GP who tried to kill mum’s lover with poisoned Covid jab jailed for 31 years

A GP who tried to kill his mother’s partner right in front of her by giving him a poisoned jab while disguised as a Covid nurse has been jailed for more than 31 years.

Thomas Kwan admitted the attempted murder of Patrick O’Hara, 72, in an ‘audacious’ plot driven by greed.

Wearing a long coat, flat cap and tinted glasses along with surgical gloves and medical mask, he went undetected for 45 minutes while examining Mr O’Hara at his mother’s home in Newcastle and even took her blood pressure before administering the jab.

The poison caused Mr O’Hara to suffer flesh-eating disease necrotising fascilitis – and surgeons had to cut away part of his arm to save his life.

Mr O’Hara told Newcastle Crown Court: ‘This incident should have been the end of me.

‘The nature of what had occurred to my body has left me speechless. Had it have not been for medical intervention I am positive that, not only would I have lost my left arm, but my life as well.’

Mr O’Hara needed weeks of hospital treatment and plastic surgery after having some of the flesh on his arm removed, and said the attack left him ‘a shell of an individual’.

Kwan, who was obsessed with money and developed a deep knowledge of poisons, planned his murder bid for months by writing fake letters, supposedly from the NHS, offering Mr O’Hara a home visit in January this year.

The married 53-year-old was motivated by money after finding out that his mother, Jenny Leung, had made a will which allowed Mr O’Hara to stay in her home should she die before him.

Jailing Kwan for 31 years and five months, Mrs Justice Lambert said: ‘It was an audacious plan to murder a man in plain sight and you very nearly succeeded in your objective.’

She told him: ‘You were certainly obsessed by money and more particularly, the money to which you considered yourself entitled.

‘No doubt you tried to kill Mr O’Hara for financial gain.’

The judge said there might well have been ‘bad blood’ between Kwan and his mother, going back to his childhood, adding: ‘Whatever the deep-rooted cause, by 2024 and well before, your resentment and bitterness towards your mother and Mr O’Hara was all to do with money and your belief you were not being given money which you thought you were entitled to.’

Opening the case to jurors, prosecutor Peter Makepeace KC said: ‘Sometimes, occasionally perhaps, the truth really is stranger than fiction.

‘The case you are about to try, on any view, is an extraordinary case.

‘Mr Thomas Kwan, the defendant in the case, was in January of this year a respected and experienced medical doctor in general practice with a GP’s surgery based in Sunderland.

‘From November 2023 at the latest, and probably long before then, he devised an intricate plan to kill his mother’s long-term partner, a man called Patrick O’Hara.

‘On any view that man had done absolutely nothing to offend Mr Kwan in any way whatsoever. He was however a potential impediment to Mr Kwan inheriting his mother’s estate upon her death.

‘Mr Kwan used his encyclopaedic knowledge of, and research into, poisons to carry out his plan.

‘That plan was to disguise himself as a community nurse, attend Mr O’Hara’s address, the home he shared with the defendant’s mother, and inject him with a dangerous poison under the pretext of administering a Covid booster injection.

‘It was an audacious plan, it was a plan to murder a man in plain sight, to murder a man right in front of his own mother’s eyes, that man’s life partner.’

Officers scoured CCTV and were able to track Kwan, still disguised as a nurse, back to a city centre hotel and then to his home in Ingleby Barwick, Teesside.

In his garage they discovered an array of dangerous chemicals which the GP had amassed.

On his computer they found the instructions on how to make the chemical weapon ricin.

It was first thought he had used ricin on Mr O’Hara but a poisons expert said iodomethane, which is used in pesticides, was more likely.

Kwan went on trial last month and changed his plea to guilty after the prosecution opened the case against him.

Paul Greaney KC, defending, said the GP was previously of positive good character, and had ‘ruined his life’.

He described Kwan’s disguise, when he passed himself off as a nurse, as ‘amateurish’ and ‘clumsy’.

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