Knife attack surgeon gets home detention

A ROYAL Darwin Hospital surgeon who held a knife to the neck of a taxi driver has been sentenced to two months home detention

Royal Darwin Hospital surgeon Karthik Thangaraj has been sentenced to home detention after holding a knife to a taxi driver's throat. Picture: Linkedin

• RDH surgeon’s road rage knife attack on cabbie

A ROYAL Darwin Hospital surgeon who held a knife to the neck of a taxi driver has been sentenced to two months home detention.

Karthik Thangaraj pleaded guilty in January to one count of aggravated assault stemming from a road rage incident in the carpark of the bottle shop at the Casuarina Club on Trower Rd.

Thangaraj has spent the past three weeks in jail at Holtze Prison after being remanded when he entered his guilty plea.

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Judge Elisabeth Armitage said the knife attack was out of character and accepted the surgeon was suffering form bipolar disorder at the time of the attack, which she said was a serious example of an aggravated assault on a vulnerable victim.

Thangaraj has separately been charged with criminal deception from an unrelated incident.

Court documents showed Thangaraj was trying to turn off Trower Rd into the Casuarina Club bottle shop car park on the night of June 22 last year at the same time as taxi driver Gurinder Singh was leaving the carpark.

“A stalemate ensued between both the defendant and the victim in their motor vehicles and neither were willing to move out of (the) other’s way,” court documents said.

Thangaraj, whose wife is also a surgeon, pulled a small folding knife from the driver’s side door pocket walked towards Mr Singh and held the knife to his throat.

Thangaraj continued shouting at Mr Singh, whose right arm he took hold of.

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Mr Singh, who was effectively pinned down in the driver’s seat of his Toyota Tarago cab, could feel the sharp edge of the blade against the skin of his throat, court documents say.

A bottle shop attendant, Alexander Marquez, ran towards the men and confronted Thangaraj, who he demanded hand over the knife.

Thangaraj drove away from the scene and falsely told police the next day he had no knowledge of the incident and that Mr Marquez must have written the registration details down incorrectly.

More to come