A DOCTOR said to be obsessed with child porn was today starting an eight-year jail sentence for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl at An East Anglian hospital by pretending to perform an abortion.

A DOCTOR said to be obsessed with child porn was today starting an eight-year jail sentence for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl at An East Anglian hospital by pretending to perform an abortion.

Rashid Sandhu, who was working in A&E at the James Paget University Hospital at Gorleston, also admitted having a stash of more than 170 pornographic images of children on his home computer.

It is thought Sandhu's unhealthy obsession with the child images led him to sexually assault the teenager after she had gone to see him about stomach and urinary pains.

The Pakistani national inserted tubes in the girl and rubbed her breast with gel after tricking her into thinking she needed an abortion and taking her to his office at the hospital.

Jailing him for eight years at Norwich Crown Court and placing him on the sex offenders' register for life Judge Simon Barham told him: “The offence amounts to the gravest abuse of trust owed by you as a doctor to a patient.”

He said Sandhu had shown a high degree of manipulative and predatory behaviour. He also banned Sandhu from ever working with children but did not make any recommendation for deportation and said this was a matter for the Home Office.

John Donolly, mitigating, said that Sandhu's glittering career as a doctor was now almost certainly finished. “It would be an almost inevitable sequence that his ability to practice medicine will be severely restricted.”