Tamworth brain image doctor banned for assault and racism

A doctor has been struck off for assaulting a woman, making racist or derogatory comments and uploading an image of a patient’s brain on his dating profile.

Dr Sayed Talibi, from Tamworth, Staffordshire, was sanctioned by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) after it found his fitness to practise was impaired.

Other examples of his misconduct included threatening a woman with waterboarding, posing for pictures with weapons and stealing milk powder worth £23.50 from Asda.

The tribunal decided to erase Dr Talibi’s name from the General Medical Council’s register, effective immediately.

The MPTS record of the tribunal, which concluded on 8 August, said Dr Talibi:

• behaved in a threatening or abusive manner towards a woman, including stating that he would subject her to waterboarding, in 2016-7
• physically assaulted the woman in 2016-7
• “intentionally penetrated the woman without her consent” in 2017
• contacted the woman in 2018 in breach of a non-molestation order
• uploaded an inappropriate picture of himself to a dating website in September 2017, which showed him performing brain surgery and included the exposed brain of the patient, without the patient’s permission
• illegally recorded his own hearing at Birmingham Magistrates’ Court in January 2017 when he was due to be sentenced for driving offences
• made racist or derogatory statements including “I hate Afghan culture” and “I hate kuffar [non-Muslims] and white people” or similar between January 2016 and August 2017
• posed for photographs between 2007 and 2017 while holding guns, knives and an axe
• on more than one occasion downloaded and/or viewed video footage of beheadings and killings and an image of a waterboarding device
• stole £23.50 worth of milk powder from a branch of Asda in Tamworth in May 2017
• provided false information to his energy provider over a £770 energy bill in June 2017

The chairman of the panel, Andrew Lewis, said Dr Talibi’s conduct was “fundamentally incompatible with his continued registration”.

“It [the tribunal] concluded that erasure was the only sanction that it could impose given the seriousness of the misconduct, the lack of insight and remediation shown, and the risk of repetition that remained,” he wrote in the report.

He said allowing him to return to “unrestricted practice” would be inconsistent with the findings due to the “seriousness” of Dr Talibi’s misconduct.

The report said Dr Talibi had 28 days to lodge an appeal against the tribunal’s decision.