Consultant struck off over child pornography
AFORMER Heartlands Hospital doctor has been struck off after accessing more than 11,000 indecent images of children.
Consultant anaesthetist Emil Guirguis, 59, was convicted of possessing the images in October at Stoke Crown Court but managed to avoid jail.
He pleaded guilty to three offences of possessing indecent images of children, three offences of making indecent images of children and one offence of possessing extreme pornographic images.
Now a Medical Practice Tribunal has struck Guirguis from the medical register after hearing that his sick library of child abuse images could have been started as far back as 1995.
Guirguis’s secret double life was revealed when his £400,000 Solihull home was raided in 2015, along with another property in Staffordshire, when officers seized laptops and hard drives.
They discovered the former Heartland Hospital doctor had collected more than 11,000 indecent images of children – 1,028 of which were extreme images.
At the time sentencing in October, Judge Timothy Smith said: “You of are somebody who has lived a double life. Each of the images that you downloaded were images of real children. It defies belief. You have brought shame upon yourself, your family and your profession.”
Guirguis was handed a threeyear community order with a requirement to comply with the internet sex offender treatment programme.
He was also made the subject of a five-year Sexual Harm Prevention Order and will be on the sex offenders’ register for the same period. The case was referred to the General Medical Council (GMC) after Guirguis applied for voluntary erasure from the regis- ter, after claiming he wanted to “go into sales or trading in stocks and shares”.
The MPTS hearing in Manchester found he had “developed a compulsion for accessing this illegal pornographic material”, and had “little insight” into the scale of his offence.
During his trial the court heard how he denied getting any sexual gratification from the pictures, claiming he did not realise what he was doing was illegal.
Chairman Dr Nigel Westwood said: “The most important aggravating factors are the volume and seriousness of the pornographic images that you downloaded and retained over a lengthy period of time which extended, even by your own admission, from 2002 until your arrest in 2015.”