LONDON: A police officer has been sacked in Cambridgeshire after he went missing during a duty and was found having a kebab when his colleagues were searching him.
PC Richard Musgrave, 52, lied about his whereabouts when he went to eat a kebab in his patrol car, parked in an industrial estate, a disciplinary panel heard.
When they couldn’t get hold of him, Musgrave’s colleagues were forced to send a search party out to try and find him in March, Cambridgeshire, in the early hours of July 31, 2016.
They managed to track him down to an industrial estate – where he was eating the kebab – using a police mapping tool that officers carry on their person. Musgrave initially claimed that he had fallen asleep – but later said that his watch had stopped, his phone was on silent and his police ear-piece ‘came apart’.
He eventually admitted that he was actually eating a kebab from a local eatery named Moonlight Grill.
He was at the tail end of a 10-hour shift that he had done without a break, the panel heard. The following evening, the officer also filed an ‘incomplete’ report after failing to intervene when his wife Linda Musgrave, 59, and her friends verbally abused bar staff at the Hippodrome Wetherspoon’s.
Musgrave was found guilty of gross misconduct and dismissed from Cambridgeshire Police. In a statement, Musgrave admitted lying to his manager Sergeant Rob Savill about taking his wife home because he felt ’embarrassed’. He was said to have breached professional standards of honesty and integrity, duties and responsibility, and discreditable conduct at the hearing in Peterborough.
