AN AYRSHIRE health worker has been convicted of wasting police time after plunging a knife into her abdomen outside a hospital building – and then claiming someone else had done it.

Donna Maxwell denied staging the attack outside the Ailsa Hospital in Ayr in November 2018.

But a jury found the 47-year-old, from Irvine, guilty by majority after a trial at Ayr Sheriff Court.

Maxwell had been charged with making statements to the police, at her home and at Ayr Hospital, where she was later treated, which she knew to be false, thereby “temporarily depriving the public of [the police’s] services and rendering the lieges liable to suspicion and accusation of assault to injury”.

The jury had heard that a suspect, who was named during the trial as Abigail Hill, had been arrested in connection with the incident and had later appeared in court, but that the case against her was then dropped.

The court was told Ms Hill has since died.

Under cross-examination on the fourth day of the trial, Maxwell told procurator fiscal depute Alasdair Millar that the accusation she had stabbed herself was “completely untrue”.

The jury's verdict was delivered after just over an hour and a half of deliberations.

More to follow.