After 12 years on the run, ex-doctor is jailed for sexually assaulting girls

An Irish former doctor has been sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting two young girls.

Rory Doyle, a fugitive for 12 years in Ireland and Morocco, was finally sentenced in Florida after hammering out a plea agreement with prosecutors.

The 59-year-old from Donnybrook, Dublin, had consistently claimed he was not guilty of the offences, both ahead of his initial trial in 2001 and then after he was returned to the US from Tangier late last year.

But he suddenly changed his plea last week, admitting to molestation and fondling of a child under 16 and for failing to appear at his trial, on the eve of which he fled and returned to Ireland.

Doyle received a further five-year sentence for failing to turn up for the trial, which will run concurrently with the 12-year term.

He was finally found in 2009, where he was practising as a doctor under the name David West. This followed an investigation by the Irish Medical Council into complaints against him.

It brings to an end a remarkable tale that involved extradition hearings at the highest courts in Ireland and a series of events that led a judge to describe the situation as a “mockery of the [extradition] process”.

Doyle, despite his fleeing Florida on the eve of his trial, living under a changed name for years in Ireland, and significant assets, and the fact US prosecutors objected to him even being bail, was given his passport back just ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on his extradition.

In early 2010, the High Court ordered his extradition back to the US to face the charges. Doyle appealed to the Supreme Court, which was due to deliver its verdict in February 2012.

But Doyle disappeared again when he was given his passport back in 2011 after telling a judge he wanted to visit his brother in England for a week over Christmas. He said his mother would be accompanying him.

It subsequently emerged his mother spent the week in a hotel in Cork. She told gardaí in Donnybrook her son had disappeared but the extradition unit was not informed for nearly a month.

He was arrested in Tangier last November.