GP 'planned to kill mother's partner with fake Covid booster jab', trial hears

A respected GP devised an “audacious” plan to kill his mother’s partner by disguising himself as a community nurse and poisoning him with a fake Covid booster jab, a court has heard.

Thomas Kwan, 53, who is a partner of a surgery in Sunderland, denies attempting to murder Patrick O’Hara, then aged 71, at his mother’s home in Newcastle city centre on January 22. He also denies an alternative charge of grievous bodily harm with intent.

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Kwan has pleaded guilty to administering a noxious substance but the Crown’s case is that he meant to kill the pensioner.

Peter Makepeace KC, prosecuting, told Newcastle Crown Court: “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.”

Mr Makepeace said the plan involved Kwan forging NHS documentation, disguising himself, using false number plates and booking in to a hotel using a false name.

He said: “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.”

Mr Makepeace said the defendant will say his intention was to cause “no more than mild pain or discomfort”.

Mr O’Hara had been in a relationship with Kwan’s mother, Jenny Leung, for more than 20 years, jurors were told.

She named Mr O’Hara in her will to the effect that he could stay in her house in St Thomas Street, Newcastle, should she die before her partner.

That decision led to her having a strained relationship with her son, so much so that the police were called when Kwan burst into her home uninvited in November 2022, the court was told.

A year later, Kwan, who is married with a son and lived 50 miles south in Brading Court, Ingleby Barwick, Teesside, faked a letter from the NHS on his home computer to Mr O’Hara “with chilling authenticity”, Mr Makepeace said.

Claiming to be from a community nurse called Raj Patel, he offered Mr O’Hara a home visit, following up that letter in January.

Mr Makepeace said: “As, I suspect, would any of us, Mr O’Hara fell for it hook, line and sinker, he had not the slightest suspicion that this was anything other than a genuine NHS community care initiative which he warmly welcomed and was grateful for.”

The trial continues.