Doc Suspended After Court Finds He Poisoned His Partner and Her Parents

Physicians are supposed to do no harm, but three poisonings and a resulting child care case in family court have left a U.K. doctor suspended from practice.

Earlier this week, a family court in London found that a Bulgarian-born physician poisoned his now former partner and her parents with thallium, killing her father, the Guardian reported.

The doctor, who moved to the U.K. in the late 2000s, and his former partner, who is also from Bulgaria, had a child in 2010, according to the Guardian. On a 2012 visit to Bulgaria, the doctor added thallium — known to be difficult to detect — to a pot of coffee that his former partner and her parents drank from. Her father died 2 days later, and both women became seriously ill, but survived.

Though the court forbade the doctor (as well as his former partner and their son) from being named, according to the Guardian, the General Medical Council, which maintains the register of medical professionals in the U.K., said that it had suspended the physician in January and an investigation into the events that led to the court’s decision is ongoing.

However, it was not immediately clear just how recently the doctor had been practicing. And the case — and the meandering legal course it has taken — were reported to be unusual.

Although the Bulgarian police have made inquiries into the poisoning and interviewed the doctor, and though the Metropolitan Police in London have also been notified, the doctor has not been charged with any criminal offense, according to the Guardian.

The case ended up in family court after the doctor began legal action in 2018 to try to gain access to his son, the Guardian reported. The doctor’s former partner argued that he should not have contact with his son because of the poisoning.

The Independent reported that the judgement in family court is “a legal rarity,” because the doctor was “found to have committed the killing on the balance of probabilities in a civil court rather than beyond all reasonable doubt by a jury in a criminal court.”

Ultimately, the family court judge determined that the doctor tried to cover up the poisoning by asking fellow physicians to identify the source of his former partner’s illness as Guillain-Barré syndrome, the Guardian reported. In the ruling, the judge also wrote that as a qualified medical professional, the doctor “would have had the intellectual capacity to determine the amounts of thallium that would be required to deliver a sufficient dose to kill an individual without delivering such a significant dose as to make it obvious to the consumer of the drink that it had been contaminated.”

Simon Bruce, a lawyer who is representing the doctor’s former partner, told the Guardian that his client “was intensely worried that her son’s father was practicing as a doctor in England for years.”

Delphine Philip Law, legal counsel for the doctor, declined to comment on the suspension, but vehemently denied the allegations of poisoning, according to the Guardian.