GP on run with £400,000 of NHS cash ‘shot lover and self ’
A GP who left Britain after as much as £400,000 of NHS money went missing is believed to have shot his girlfriend dead before taking his own life.
Titus Bradley, 42, is suspected of gunning down Noemi Gergely, 28, in a guesthouse in Cape Verde before turning the weapon on himself.
Police on the island of Santo Antão confirmed they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the deaths, which they are treating as a murder-suicide.
Dr Bradley had left the UK a year ago after staff pay and pension funds went missing from his four practices around Hastings, East Sussex.
Sussex Police confirmed it had launched an investigation into the missing NHS cash last May, a month after the GP failed to return from a threeweek fishing trip to Santo Antão. A source told The Sun the missing money included up to £200,000 of NHS money that was earmarked to pay wages and fund the practices, as well as up to £200,000 that was supposed to have been paid into staff pensions.
Dr Bradley and Ms Gergely checked into the Divin Art guesthouse in the town of Ribeira Grande on April 15, two days before their deaths, authorities confirmed. Local officials said they were killed by single bullet wounds to the head after reports of a row.
Helder Bentub, the guesthouse manager who found the bodies, said: “There was a terrible argument. They were in their room but we could hear shouting and the banging of doors and windows. They came out of their rooms and went to the restaurant and argued again and the woman told one of our staff that her companion had hit her.
“We heard the shots ring out a couple of minutes later when they were both back in their room. We found them lying dead in the bathroom after forcing our way in.”
Cipriano Bandeira, the local police chief, said: “We are not looking for anyone else at this stage. As far as we are concerned, with the evidence we have got at the moment, this is a homicidesuicide.”
The Cape Verde archipelago, consisting of 10 islands and eight islets, lies in the Atlantic Ocean, about 350 miles off the west of Africa, near Senegal.