GP filmed himself molesting drugged patients

A family doctor was facing a lengthy jail sentence yesterday for sex attacks on child and adult patients in a "horrendous betrayal" stretching back 24 years.

Timothy Healy, 56, described by police as part of a "paedophile ring of professionals", operated from surgeries and his home in East Finchley, north London.

He drugged some of his patients and then filmed himself abusing them as they lay unconscious, the court was told. The victims, all male, did not know they had been abused until police tracked them down last year. Some are now being counselled. Others have not been identified.

Victims who were not drugged included teenagers Healy had met while a medical officer in the army cadets. They were either too embarrassed to come forward or feared they would not be believed, and so kept their ordeals secret until contacted by officers from Scotland Yard's paedophile unit.

Healy was arrested at Gatwick airport in May last year after he returned from a holiday in Tunisia.

He pleaded guilty to a total of 31 offences at Southwark Crown Court in London yesterday. The offences included 15 indecent assaults – four of them on children – dating back to 1978, five counts of taking indecent photographs, five of possessing them and six of administering a "stupefying or overpowering" drug to commit sex attacks. A further 12 charges, which he denied, were left on the file.

Judge Bathurst Norman told Healy, who has been suspended by the General Medical Council, that sentencing would be delayed until 20 September for reports. Jail was "almost inevitable".

Detectives said outside court that Healy's crimes had come to light through an anonymous phone call early last year to the Yard's child pornography line.