A MAN has been found guilty of carrying out a bomb hoax which led to the north’s flagship hospital being evacuated.
A surgical operation was halted and one person who was on 24-hour kidney dialysis was among eight critically-ill patients who had to be moved after Gareth Benbow made a threatening call.
Visiting relatives and medics also fled the building at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness after being told there was going to be an explosion.
Yesterday, a jury took just 40 minutes to convict 33-year-old Benbow of phoning a warning to the hospital’s intensive care ward.
And after their unanimous verdict was delivered at Inverness Sheriff Court, it emerged that he has four previous convictions for misusing the telephone system.
He has also committed six previous breaches of the peace, and has a further three convictions for criminal damage.
The bomb hoax happened on August 24.
Jurors heard yesterday that armed police officers searched the hospital after patients had been moved to safety – but no explosive device was ever found.
Sheriff Margaret Neilson deferred sentence until March 31 for background reports to be carried out.
She was told Benbow, of Inverness, had spent 110 days on remand after being charged with making the hoax call, but was released on bail on December 20 after his trial was postponed.
But yesterday he was taken back into custody after Sheriff Neilson revoked his bail because of the “very serious nature of the charge”.
During Benbow’s trial, the jury heard that the evacuation of Raigmore involved moving eight critically ill people from the intensive care unit, as well as 10 from the children’s ward and nine from the cancer ward.
One of the cancer patients forced from their beds was dying from a terminal condition.
One operation had to be cancelled during the evacuation and several more had to be postponed because of the knock-on impact.
Nurse Mary-Helen Hendry, 57, answered the phone at around 4.10pm and heard a voice say: “You have 20 minutes to evacuate the ward. There is a bomb about to go off.” Ms Hendry said that she immediately believed the caller was Gareth Benbow, who she had spoken to many times.
Patients were allowed to return about an hour after the initial alert.
However, duty manager on the day, William McLernan, 42, said the evacuation had major repercussions for the running of the entire hospital.
Benbow was also found guilty of a string of offences between January 1, 2013, and August 24, 2013, in which he behaved in a threatening and abusive manner towards staff at the hospital. The court heard he had been admitted to Raigmore 19 times between January and August after deliberately overdosing on a cocktail of drugs, including morphine. Doctors said that he was placed on a ventilator in intensive care until he came round.
But he would then regularly launch into a foul-mouthed tirade demanding painkilling treatment for a knee complaint.
Consultant anaesthetist Dr Alexander Hunter, 51, said that Benbow’s demand for morphine for his knee problem could not be medically justified.
Several other staff members described feeling intimidated by Benbow’s behaviour.
Staff nurse John Ritchie, 54, had been involved in treating Benbow six times, and said he had to apologise to other staff and visitors to the ward on several occasions because of his patient’s conduct.