Edinburgh GP sentenced to four years in jail after raping a student nurse

 Image by Matthew Donnelly

A doctor of Indian origin who raped a student nurse has been sentenced to four years in jail by the High Court in Edinburgh.

39-year-old Manesh Gill, contacted the woman on a dating app and then lured her to a hotel room in Stirling after they met. He then proceeded to attack her in an incident which the victim described as “distressing and frightening”.

Gill was a general practitioner based in Edinburgh and is a married man with three children. He made a profile under the name ‘Mike’ on the online dating platform Tinder, where he first interacted with the victim. They communicated with each other for six weeks on Snapchat before they finally met.

When they reached the hotel, Gill poured a “really strong” glass of pink gin and lemonade for the young woman and made her go to his room after which he attacked and raped her.

During the trial, the woman was seen fighting back her tears and said that her body had “shut down” because of the sexual assault. She also told the prosecutor Stephanie Ross, “He was on top of me. I was trying to push him off. I couldn’t, I just felt like my whole body was stuck to the bed. He was having sex with me. I wanted to go home. I felt as if I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything.”

The woman told Gill to “stop” during the attack and afterwards got up and went to the bathroom. She told him that she was aware of what he had done to her and left the hotel to inform the police about the incident.

Judge Lord Tyre said that he had “no doubt” that the offence Gill had committed was worthy of a custodial sentence due to its seriousness and that he would be added to the sex offenders list indefinitely.