Top surgeon is spared jail over two sex assaults... as he’s too good at his job
A RENOWNED heart surgeon has been spared jail for molesting two women after a female judge said it could be in the public interest for him to operate again. Mohamed Amrani, 54, was found guilty of groping a woman’s breasts through her clothes and smacking another’s bottom while working in hospitals.
The consultant has conducted a string of life- saving operations and hit the headlines in 2007 when he performed the UK’s first double heart valve replacement using keyhole surgery.
Yesterday Judge Anne Molyneux described him as an ‘outstandingly good heart surgeon’ as she sentenced him to six months imprisonment, suspended for a year, at the Old Bailey.
She told Amrani: ‘You have saved lives, you have done work that others were not willing to do, you have shown commitment to the NHS, you have given time to work for charity.’
The court heard Amrani, of Harrow in north-west London, has been suspended since 2015 and now faces disciplinary action from the General Medical Council, which could strike him off.
But his barrister Stephen Vullo QC said Amrani has been offered a job in Morocco, where GMC restrictions do not apply, adding he hoped to retain the prospect of again working in the UK.
The judge said ‘the public inter- est may well be in favour of your operating again’ as she concluded a suspended sentence should be imposed. Amrani stood trial over accusations from five women between 2001 and 2014.
He denied all of the allegations but last month a jury found him guilty of two indecent assaults and a sexual assault on two different women.
He twice groped a woman’s breasts through her clothes at the NHS Harefield Hospital in west London between 2003 and 2004.
And a decade later, in 2014, he smacked another woman’s bottom at Bupa’s private Cromwell Hospital in Kensington. The court heard how the first woman had complained to the hospital about being indecently assaulted and was allegedly told to ‘just ignore him, he does it to everyone’.
Her husband described it as ‘a pretty devastating event’ in her life, telling the court she came home ‘very, very upset’.
He added: ‘My wife told me she had been groped and I understood that to be touching her over her clothing in a sexual manner.’
The judge described the attacks as ‘workplace bullying of a sexual nature’, saying: ‘This was an abuse of power arising from the trust placed in you by the hospital and by those who worked with you.’ The court heard that when Amrani smacked his second victim on the bottom in an operating theatre she turned around to slap his face.
She told jurors: ‘He looked surprised. He said, “Would you really hit me?” I said, “Yes I would”.’
Judge Molyneux said of the incident: ‘This was a sexual assault. What the incident demonstrates is your sense of entitlement and your instinct to rely on your power to do as you pleased.’
The woman said in a statement: ‘I tried to put the whole incident behind me, but in time I realised Mr Amrani’s behaviour towards colleagues was not isolated’.
Prosecutor Peter Clement QC said ‘ on one view [ Amrani] offended in the belief that by virtue of his position his offending would not be reported, or if reported, his accusers would not be believed’.
He received concurrent four month suspended sentences for the indecent assaults and a consecutive two-month term for sexual assault. He was acquitted of seven further counts.
‘A sense of entitlement’