LONDON (Reuters) – A British doctor was on Wednesday jailed for more than 31 years for an audacious but unsuccessful plot to kill his mother’s partner with a fake COVID-19 vaccine, which involved him forging medical documents and dressing in disguise to poison his victim.

Thomas Kwan, 53, passed himself off as a nurse and even took his own mother’s blood pressure before administering poison to her then partner Patrick O’Hara in Newcastle, northern England.

O’Hara survived but suffered from necrotising faciitis, a potentially fatal flesh-eating bacterial infection, after receiving the jab. He also underwent multiple operations.

Kwan, a family doctor in Sunderland, pleaded guilty to attempted murder last month shortly after his trial began at Newcastle Crown Court. He had previously admitted a charge of administering a noxious substance.

Judge Christina Lambert sentenced Kwan to 31 years and five months in prison for what she described as “an audacious plan to murder a man in plain sight”.

(Reporting by Sam Tobin; editing by Michael Holden)