'The fear of God was in me': Sex predator surgeon's victim speaks of trauma
By ITV News reporter Ben Chapman
Nafees Hamid was an award-winning, respected, and above all, trusted surgeon. Police say that is what makes his crimes all the more shocking, and all the more serious.
He attacked his victims when they were at their most vulnerable; lying on his examination table, alone with him in the privacy of his consulting room.
They had come to the Birmingham-based neurosurgeon for help with back and neck pain. Instead, they were sexually assaulted.
“The fear of God was in me,” recounts one of the women he attacked. “I was in a state of panic. I just lay there, frozen to the spot, unable to move, just wanting it to end.”
Her consultation had begun normally, until Hamid asked her to undress, removing some of her clothes himself.
He did not offer her the chance to have somebody else present as he began what he would later describe as an “intimate examination”. But it was no such thing.
She went to the police, unaware of how many women had been through the same ordeal. As each of Hamid’s female patients were written to, and other victims came forward, a pattern of abuse emerged, spanning two hospitals.
Today Hamid was jailed for 16 years after being convicted of nine serious sexual offences against six women. He was cleared of six other sexual assaults relating to four other women.
But even at his trial, he maintained some of the assaults were ‘medically justified’, despite having never been entered in the patient’s notes.
A leading neurosurgeon told the court there was no justification for carrying out such examinations.
On some occasions, he would make lewd comments, or ask intimate questions.
The victim and others he abused say they have been left scarred by their experiences, unable to trust people: especially doctors.
“I’m trying my hardest not to let it affect me, because I don’t want it to,” she said. “But it will always be there, that lack of trust.”
The prosecutor at his trial said Hamid had broken the first rule of medicine, to do no harm.
The loss of an otherwise successful career, and his liberty, are likely to be the price of such a breach.