Belgian doctors have reported a surge in overseas visitors, particularly from France, seeking an assisted suicide on arrival in the country, reports Daily Mail.

Medical professionals claim that euthanasia tourists have been flooding through hospital A&E’s demanding a lethal injection which they can receive for free with a European Union’s health insurance card.

Last year, a staggering 2,023 patients were medically killed in the country, according to IBTimes.

The trend has been highlighted by Olivier Vermylen an emergency doctor at a Brussels hospital: ‘It’s a phenomenon that did not exist five or six years ago. Nowadays I get phone calls about French people who arrive in the emergency room announcing that they want euthanasia.’

He also revealed to the newspaper that French patients made up seven out of 15 cases of assisted suicide in his hospital.

Death tourists have been flocking to Belgium as treatment is free through the EHIC card but the trend is attracting concern among medical academics.

Professor Raphael Cohen-Almagor from the University of Hull who has been studying end of life concerns for the past 25 years, a vocal proponent of physician-assisted suicide, said he finds this phenomenon most disturbing.

In 2003 Belgium was the second country in the world to legalise euthanasia after Holland liberalised the law a year earlier, becoming the first country since Nazi Germany to permit the practice.

Over the past decade the numbers of Belgians dying by euthanasia has crept up incrementally.

In June, MailOnline reported on Belgian doctors killing a perfectly healthy 24-year-old woman by euthanasia because she was suffering from 'suicidal thoughts'.