COP FACES DOUBLE RAPE RAP

Officer denies attacks and string of other sex offences

A POLICE officer is to stand trial charged with raping two women and indecently assaulting a third.

It is claimed that Blair Pettigrew twice raped one of the women while wearing his police uniform.

He is further charged with indecently communicating with a fourth woman, including by means of police radio.

It is also alleged he accessed the Scottish Intelligence Database to get information on women.

Pettigrew, 34, yesterday entered not guilty pleas to all the accusations during a hearing at the High Court in Glasgow.

The indictment includes offences spanning from 2005 to 2015.

One of the charges relates to an alleged rape at a house in Ayrshire between August 2013 and April 2015.

The charge states it took place while he was “in police uniform”.

The charge includes claims Pettigrew threatened to expose details of the woman’s “private life” and that officers would search her parents’ home if she did not agree to sex.

Prosecutors have listed an alternative accusation of sexually coercing her.

A separate charge claims Pettigrew, from Ardrossan, Ayrshire, raped the same woman a second time in 2015, again while in his uniform.

He faces other claims of offences against her including sexual assault.

The indictment also alleges Pettigrew raped a second woman between 2006 and 2007 in Glasgow.

It is claimed he told her or caused her to believe that if she did not carry out a sex act he “would take her into police custody”.

The indecent assault charge relating to the third woman is said to have happened in Glasgow between 2005 and 2008.

Judge Lord Beckett set a trial to begin next January in Edinburgh.

The case could last up to four weeks.