Officer to stand trial on rape charges

A police officer has been accused of sexual assaults over a ten-year period – including an attack while in uniform. Police Constable Blair Pettigrew, 34, is charged with raping two women, allegedly threatening to take one of his victims into custody if she refused his advances. He is said to have told another he would expose details of her private life and arrange for colleagues to search her parents` home if she did not agree to sex. PC Pettigrew faced the accusations during a hearing at the High Court in Glasgow on Wednesday (August 9). The charges allege the Police Scotland officer raped his first victim between 2006 and 2007 in Glasgow. It is claimed he told her, or caused her to believe, that if she did not carry out a sex act he “would take her into police custody”. The second woman is said to have been raped twice on dates between 2013 and 2015 in East Ayrshire, once while “in police uniform”. The charge includes claims he threatened to expose details of the woman`s private life and that officers would search her parents` home if she did not agree to sexual activity. Prosecutors have listed an alternative accusation of sexual coercion. He is further alleged to have indecently assaulted a third woman in Glasgow between 2005 and 2008 and communicated indecently with a fourth, both in person and via telephone calls. He is then said to have accessed the Scottish Intelligence Database to access information on a number of women. PC Pettigrew, of Ardrossan, North Ayrshire, denied the charges and Judge Lord Beckett set a trial due to begin in January.