Indian doctor ‘patted my buttock and tried to touch my private parts’, Hong Kong student nurse tells court
Orthopaedist denies indecently assaulting student at Queen Elizabeth Hospital
A student nurse on Monday accused an orthopaedist of patting his left buttock and trying to touch his private parts while he was changing clothes at a public hospital last month.
The nurse told Kowloon City Court that Sandip Ghosh had indecently assaulted him and asked: “Do you like it?”
But Ghosh, a 45-year-old Indian government doctor taking part in a clinical attachment programme in Hong Kong, testified that the incident was a misunderstanding as he had only touched the nurse’s hip by accident when demonstrating how his dislocated shoulder could be fixed by pulling on his arm.
He recounted that what he had actually said was: “Do it like this.”
Ghosh pleaded not guilty to one count of indecent assault before deputy magistrate Leung Lai-yin, who will deliver his verdict on Wednesday.
The alleged assault took place on April 8 at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Yau Ma Tei.
The nurse, who cannot be identified, testified that he was halfway through changing into his uniform just before 7am when an Indian stranger greeted him with a handshake and partly incomprehensible English, and patted his left buttock two to three times.
The stranger, whom the nurse later identified in court as Ghosh, then stretched out his right hand to the area around his crotch but was stopped by the nurse.
“No,” the nurse recalled himself saying before putting on his trousers, after which Ghosh left the changing room.
Defence counsel David Boyton argued the indecent assault claim was a “convenient excuse” for the nurse to account for why he had been late for 7am duty.
The nurse disagreed but admitted with a smile that he had been late for work on “many occasions”.
Boyton also suggested the nurse had misunderstood his client’s English because of a strong accent. The nurse disagreed.
In self defence, Ghosh said he had woken up that morning to find his right shoulder partially dislocated again – a recurrent problem – so he sought help from people in his building. Among them was the nurse, who did not understand him and left quickly within 15 seconds.
“Before God, I’m telling the truth,” Ghosh said. “I had no bad intentions.”
Dr Wilson Li, a defence witness who supervised Ghosh at the hospital, said the defendant’s MRI scan on April 24 suggested he had suffered from a dislocated shoulder in the prior six weeks.
He also noted Ghosh’s prior experiences of shoulder dislocation had been clearly documented in his Indian medical reports.
