Hero A&E doctor blacklisted after hacker stole ID
IN A case that made headlines, a prominent emergency room doctor, hailed a hero of the Selby rail disaster, was caught in an international crackdown after an FBI raid.
He was sacked, blacklisted, and dramatically brought before the courts charged with child pornography offences. But, it emerged, it wasn’t him. He had been the victim of identity theft, with a computer hacker committing crimes in his name.
It’s been 13 years since the case was thrown out by a judge who branded evidence against him “utter nonsense”, and the senior consultant has begun to rebuild his life. But he will never forget the agony of that time, of losing friends and respect, of being branded a paedophile, and of having everything he had worked towards stripped away.
“It was totally out of my control,” he said. “Even now, it’s not a subject I talk to anybody about. I dug a little hole and buried it, to move on. I’m still paranoid about something like that happening again.”
The doctor, though well known in Yorkshire, is reluctant to publish his name. For years, he struggled to rebuild his career. He has now left the county with his wife to escape the stigma.
Before his arrest, he had been a prominent doctor, a volunteer on rescue helicopters and the first flown to the scene of the Selby train crash in February 2001. But all his successes had come crashing down when police officers walked into his office and arrested him in 2002.
“It came as a complete surprise,” he said. “It was an inconvenience – this was a mistake. It was about access to a child porn site, and one of the credit cards that had been used.”
The police operation was based around the doctor’s details and passwords being on a recovered database. Although nothing incriminating was found, he was charged with incitement to distribute indecent pictures on the basis of information provided by US authorities. As soon as he was charged, he was sacked, and blacklisted by the General Medical Council. From his arrest to trial, he endured an 18-month wait to clear his name.
“I was unable to work,” he said. “I had no income and no job. My wife was very supportive, she’s suffered nearly as much as I did. But friends fell into one of two groups. There were those that were soundly supportive. And those who steadily distanced themselves. Then it came to court. The trial was three days. It never even got to me being questioned because the judge dismissed the case. Things just didn’t stand up. I was able to show I was doing other things on the dates in question. I was out of the country one day. On another, I was training with police.”
The FBI could not say which computers the orders had come from. The judge, having instructed the jury to return formal not guilty verdicts, asked the doctor to “get back to the business of saving lives”.
Having settled out of court with his former employers, he took a break, raising hens and vegetables on a smallholding and working part-time with military search and rescue teams. Now he is a successful doctor once again and was made an MBE a few years ago for his volunteer efforts. But, he says, the shadow of what happened will always hang over him.
“It did wear me down considerably,” he said. “I’m a fairly robust person. But it was three or four years before I could begin to live a normal life.”