G20 pathologist is suspended

The pathologist who carried out the first post-mortem examination on the newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson, who died at the G20 protest last year, has been suspended from the medical register for three months.

A General Medical Council disciplinary panel had previously ruled that Dr Freddy Patel had acted in a way that amounted to misconduct in two earlier post-mortems, meaning his fitness to practise was impaired. It also ruled that he had displayed deficient professional performance in a third post-mortem.

He has already been suspended from the Home Office register of forensic pathologists after questions were asked about the autopsy he carried out on the body of 47-year-old Mr Tomlinson.

The panel had already concluded that Dr Patel had failed to meet professional standards when examining the bodies of a five-year-old girl in 2002, a four-week-old baby in 2003 and a woman who died in 2005.

Dr Patel, 63, had behaved "irresponsibly", failed to meet the standards expected of a Home Office pathologist and acted in a way liable to bring the profession into disrepute when he changed the woman's cause of death in 2005, the panel found.