Trial date is set for police officer accused of rapes on Western Isles

An Inverness police officer will go on trial in December after being accused of raping two women in the Western Isles around a decade ago.

Cameron Ross will be prosecuted at the High Court in Edinburgh, where he will appear in the dock to face a total of five charges involving three alleged victims.

It is claimed that the 37-year-old assaulted and raped two women at separate addresses on Stornoway – one between August and October 2012 and the second in June 2014.

The police officer, who was most recently based at Burnett Road police station in the Highland capital, is currently suspended after working up to the rank of sergeant.

He is also accused of engaging in a course of behaviour which was abusive of a partner, and a third charge of threatening or abusive behaviour towards the same woman between October 2019 and June 2022.

The charges allege Ross threatened to kill her and “repeatedly brandish a knife at her and place a knife in her hands and incite her to stab” him.

Ross is also accused of attempting to pull her down a set of stairs while she was pregnant.

The fifth and last charge states that Ross attempted to pervert the course of justice by alleging that, in June 2022, he attempted to “intimidate” the woman as a police officer was taking down her witness statement.

It’s also claimed that Ross did “threaten to make complaints against the attending police officers or otherwise damage their careers, all in an attempt to influence the investigation”.

The Press and Journal exclusively revealed the police officer’s arrest earlier this year in

January.

Yesterday, during a preliminary hearing at the High Court in Glasgow before Lady Stacey, the judge scheduled the forthcoming six-day trial for December 3 this year.

The accused denies all the charges against him, and Mark Stewart KC, defending, has lodged a special defence of consent regarding one of the rape allegations.

Ross, originally from Nairn, was previously stationed in the Western Isles as a dog handler.

During his time policing in and around Stornoway, he worked alongside a sniffer dog called Ollie the Collie, the first UK police dog to be trained to detect drugs and firearms, as well as trace missing people.

Ross, of Appin Drive, Stratton, Inverness, first appeared in private at Inverness Sheriff Court in March 2023.