Howard Martin, the family doctor, who confessed to have hastened the deaths of some of his patients, used the support of a General Medical Council envelope, in order to provide a list of differences between himself and the serial killer, Harold Shipman.

Dr. Martin told The Daily Telegraph that he was enraged to see that he was being compared with killer Shipman, the notorious GP, who killed no less than 258 people by jabbing them with over dosage of morphine.

By an oddity of destiny, both men worked for a short time at the same practice when Shipman, by then already an assassinator but two decades from being understood, tried to pick up a career destroyed by his addiction to pethidine.

Dr. Martin, 75, said that he could remember having met the doctor at his practice in Newton Aycliffe, Co Durham, where Shipman used to work briefly as a locum.

However, he asserted that there were a number of critical differences between them and read out his listing, so as to demonstrate the point he intended to put forward.

Grasping the envelope from the doctors’ authoritarian body in his hand, Dr. Martin spoke on the points one by one, sporadically jabbing the envelope with his index finger.