A Manchester Crown Court has sentenced Nigerian-born doctor Isyaka Mamman to three years imprisonment for killing a patient in a botched procedure.
The court heard on Tuesday that Mamman lied about his age to avoid retirement. The 85-year-old, who had struck off 11 years off his real age to continue working, used the wrong needle in 2018 and inserted it in the wrong place, piercing the sac holding Shahida Parveen’s heart. The patient then bled to death.
Mamman was convicted of manslaughter following the death of Mrs Parveen at Royal Oldham Hospital.
In 2015, Mamman, then 79, performed a similar procedure. His patient Margaret Helliwell was left in agony after he shoved his knee into the grandmother’s back to force a needle into her hip with such pressure that the device bent.
Mrs Helliwell complained, and says a consultant told her that Mamman should retire and would no longer be performing such biopsies. But that did not happen.
Testifying in court, Helliwell, 81, said: “He was pummelling away so hard that the needle bent. I was screaming in pain, I was being sick and felt dizzy.
“I feel so sorry for the lady’s family. I am also angry that she went in for the same procedure as I did and she died. He shouldn’t have been allowed to continue practising because he had been caught lying.”
She said that when she read about Mrs Parveen’s death, ‘I just thought, “That could have been me”.
The court heard that in 2015 also Mamman condemned a man to permanent disability following a bone marrow biopsy done wrongly.
Mamman arrived in Britain in 1965 and began working as a haematologist.
But 20 years ago, managers at Medway Maritime Hospital in Kent noticed a discrepancy. Mamman, who had said he was born in 1936, was using a Nigerian passport that showed a birth year of 1941.
In about 2001, Mamman claimed he was born in 1947 when it was time for naturalisation as a British citizen.
