Major is cleared of raping Captain
AN ARMY Major accused of raping a female Captain has been cleared after telling a court martial he could not remember having sex as he was so drunk.
The trial heard that when they woke up in bed together neither of the officers could recall having had sex.
When Major Gregor Beaton, of the 14th Regiment, Royal Artillery, was quizzed by military police he said he might be the victim.
After a panel of senior officers cleared the Afghanistan veteran of rape, which he had denied, the Sandhurst graduate wept.
The three-day trial heard the female officer had been so drunk during the Burns Night supper on a military base that a female pal had to put her to bed.
The Captain said she had been horrified when she then woke naked
Tears...Gregor Beaton
next to the 33-year-old Scot with no memory of what had happened between them.
The court heard that during the Burns Night bash Major Beaton drank beer, wine, port and spirits – including five whiskies.
The Captain had drunk red wine, spirits and prosecco.
Bulford Military Court, in Wiltshire, heard the Captain, who cannot be named, claimed she had a “flashback” of someone “dragging her hips from behind”.
When she confronted Major Beaton he said he was “99 per cent sure” nothing had happened.
When told that his DNA had been found in the woman, he suggested he must have been forced into sex.
Judge Advocate General Jeff Blackett said Parliament should review the law around such cases when neither party can remember what has happened.
JEWEL In The Crown star Art Malik has pledged to remember the soldiers who fought in the Far East campaign, includ- ing his late father who served at the front in Burma as a doctor.
Speaking ahead of VJ Day remembrance events on Saturday, the Holby City actor recalled Mazhar Malik’s work treating British soldiers in Burma.
That experience led his dad to become a top eye surgeon in Britain and his return to Pakistan to work for a medical charity set up by a British Army officer.
Art, 67, who as Hari Kumar starred with Susan Wooldridge in ITV’s 1984 hit Jewel In The Crown, said his father, a Muslim from a village near Patna, India, never talked about Burma.
Later on his eldest brother, now a retired neurosurgeon, discovered that his dad wanted to go to medical school “but there was not much opportunity”.
Art said: “But by joining the British Indian Army in the early 1940s he got a scholarship to go to medical school.
“My brother says my father became part of the Medical Corps and looked after people at the front and progressed from India to Rangoon as the Japanese
Preserved...the Chindit Memorial
EXCLUSIVE
retreated. He talked about Rangoon to me only once when he said he had been there. I asked when? He replied: ‘With the Army’.”
Art said the experience “made Britain very easy for him. The soldiers would have told him about the lifestyle here. He always got a big kick out of talking about gardens.”
After the war and the horrors of Partition in 1947, Art’s father decided to come to Britain, becoming a top eye surgeon at