Doctor on bike died after van door pushed her under cab

A ‘BRILLIANT’ doctor was fatally injured cycling to work when a van driver opened his door, pushing her into the path of a black cab.

Professor Maria Bitner-Glindzicz, 55, a world authority in treating profoundly deaf children, died from her injuries in hospital last year. The mother-of-two worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

The doctor, pictured, began cycling after the 7/7 terrorist attacks in 2005 as a means of avoiding the Tube, where she narrowly avoided an explosion.

An inquest heard that after the fatal crash in Clerkenwell, central London, van driver Owen Turner immediately blamed the cabbie and expressed ‘no remorse’.

Turner was charged with opening his door ‘so as to injure or endanger’ but died in his sleep two days before a court hearing. A statement from him was read to Poplar Coroner’s Court in East London. Turner said: ‘It’s been disclosed by the police that I opened my door into the cyclist’s path and she fell.

‘I didn’t see anyone coming. I didn’t swing my door, but opened it carefully around halfway. As I did this, I saw a cyclist level with my door and pulled it back. She was very close. I heard the sound of a bump and saw the cyclist hit by a taxi and being dragged along underneath it.

‘I’m devastated by what I saw. My sympathies go out to the cyclist’s family.’

Cab driver Alan Nicholas, 62, became tearful as he told the inquest: ‘I didn’t see the door open or the cyclist come down. Then I felt a big bump. I thought I had gone down a pothole.’

Professor Bitner-Glindzicz’s husband David Miles told the inquest his wife’s pioneering treatments for deaf children were ‘very close’ to being used clinically.

He added: ‘My wife was an internationally-recognised scientist. She was quite simply brilliant.’

Delivering a narrative conclusion, Coroner Mary Hassell recorded that Professor Bitner-Glindzicz died after the van driver did not look before opening his door.

Mr Miles said later: ‘She reckoned she was extremely close on 7/7 to being on the carriage that had the bomb on it. Since then, she was always cycling.’