The release of a video showing a former local politician helping a 79-year-old woman commit suicide has caused outrage in Germany and prompted some states to try to tighten their rules on assisted suicide.

Former Hamburg senator Roger Kusch, a prominent right to die campaigner, has said he advised the healthy pensioner on how to prepare a lethal cocktail of sedatives and malaria drugs which would kill her and left her flat shortly before she died.

Kusch filmed nine hours of conversations with unmarried and childless Bettina Schardt, who said she dreaded being taken to a home for the elderly. However, she did not have a terminal illness and said: "I can't say that I am suffering."