British doctor banned from practicing
British court has ordered a British army doctor to stop practicing.
LONDON - A British army doctor who confirmed the death of an Iraqi detainee in 2003 was on Friday banned from practising after a tribunal found he lied about the injuries the civilian had suffered in a beating by British soldiers.
Derek Keilloh, now a family doctor, was struck off the medical register after the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) found him guilty on Sunday of dishonest conduct over the death of 26-year-old hotel receptionist Baha Mousa.
Keilloh, 38, had supervised a failed resuscitation attempt to save Mousa, who had been hooded and severely beaten by British soldiers after his arrest in September 2003 along with nine other suspected insurgents in the war-torn southern city of Basra.
Mousa, a father of two, died 36 hours after his arrest having sustained 93 separate injuries, including fractured ribs and a broken nose, an inquiry last year heard.
Keilloh, then a captain and regimental medical officer, claimed during a later interview, court martial and public inquiry that he had only seen dried blood around Mousa s nose.
But the MPTS found that the doctor had been aware of the Iraqi s other injuries from his own observations and from information by other medical staff.
At the end of a marathon 47-day hearing in Manchester, northwest England, the MPTS said Keilloh s "repeated dishonesty" meant he was no longer fit to work as a doctor.
"The panel determined that erasure is the only appropriate sanction in this case," MPTS chairman Brian Alderman told Keilloh.
"Given the gravity and nature of the extent and context of your dishonesty, it considers that your misconduct is fundamentally incompatible with continued registration."
The tribunal found that Keilloh failed to conduct an examination of Mousa s body or to act to protect the other civilian detainees from mistreatment, and also failed to notify a superior officer of what had happened.
It recognised that Keilloh had done "everything possible" to save Mousa s life in a setting that was "highly charged, chaotic, tense and stressful".
The public inquiry into the case last year found that Mousa died as a result of his injuries and his weakened physical state caused by his mistreatment, the extreme heat and a lack of food and water.
British soldier Donald Payne was jailed for a year over the death in 2007, becoming the first member of the British armed forces to be convicted of a war crime.
About 46,000 British troops were deployed to Iraq at the height of the conflict following the US-led invasion in 2003, with the vast majority withdrawn in 2009.
