A British doctor was jailed for more than 31 years Wednesday for forging medical documents and disguising himself to poison the victim in an audacious but failed plot to kill his mother's partner with a fake coronavirus vaccine. was sentenced.
Thomas Kwan, 53, pretended to be a nurse and took his mother's blood pressure before administering the poison to his then-partner Patrick O'Hara in Newcastle, northern England.
British doctor admits attempted murder after injecting mother's partner with poison disguised as vaccine
Ms O'Hara survived but suffered from necrotizing facial inflammation, a potentially fatal flesh-eating bacterial infection, after receiving the jab. He also underwent multiple surgeries.
Mr Kwan, a family doctor from Sunderland, pleaded guilty to attempted murder shortly after his trial began at Newcastle Crown Court last month. He had previously admitted charges of administering a harmful substance.
Judge Christina Lambert sentenced Kwan to 31 years and five months in prison for his “audacious plan to murder someone in public.”
She told Kwan that his plan involved “misusing knowledge of the health care system,” adding that his actions had undermined public trust in health care workers.
A British doctor has been jailed for more than 31 years for plotting to kill his mother's partner with a fake coronavirus vaccine. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
In a statement after the verdict, the Crown Prosecution Service said O'Hara had been injected with an “as yet unidentified toxin.”
“Stranger than Fiction”
Prosecutor Peter Makepeace told jurors on the first day of Kwan's trial: “Sometimes, perhaps, truth is stranger than fiction.”
Kwan said she was concerned about her mother's will, which stated that if she were alive when her mother died, O'Hara would inherit the house.
“Mr. Kwan used his encyclopedic knowledge and research in toxicology to carry out his plan,” Mr. Makepeace said.
“The plan was to disguise themselves as community nurses, attend Mr. O'Hara's speeches and the defendant's home where he lived with his mother, and inject them with a dangerous poison under the pretext of administering a booster shot against the coronavirus. That's what it was.
To carry out his plan, Kwan checked into a hotel under a false name, used a false license plate on his car and disguised himself with a wig, Makepeace added.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
After Kwan was arrested, police found a large quantity of castor beans in his home, as well as a recipe for making ricin, a biotoxin made from the beans. Exposure to pinhead-sized amounts of ricin can be fatal.
But chemical experts concluded that O'Hara had not been injected with ricin.
