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A 22-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a rare shooting in London seriously wounded an 8-year-old girl and her 32-year-old father.
The unidentified suspect was taken into custody immediately after he allegedly opened fire into a car in which the victims were sitting, police said Monday.
Two other people, identified in news reports as the girl’s mother and her 2-year-old sibling, were also inside the vehicle during the shooting. They were “thankfully unharmed,” Metropolitan Police Superintendent Owen Renowden said.
The gunfire erupted on Southern Row in London’s Ladbroke Grove area around 5:30 p.m. Sunday, prompting numerous emergency calls to police, Renowden said.
The wounded man has “potentially life-changing injuries” and the girl was undergoing surgery but expected to survive, Renowden said.
“I recognize that any shooting has a traumatic impact on the local community and I have already heard today how last night’s incident in particular has affected local people,” he said.
A witness recalled hearing “four or five shots,” followed by screaming, according to the Metro news website.
“I heard shots, and then a woman shouting, ‘My baby, my baby’s been shot!'” the witness, 64, said.
Another witness, who gave her name as Sharon, told Metro that the shooter was armed with a pistol and appeared to have carried out a “targeted” attack.
“I came out and saw a man pointing a gun into a car. I saw flashes from the gun,” she said. “He was right close to the driver side window.”
Britain has some of the world’s strictest gun control laws in the world. Authorities and recorded just 24 fatal shootings and and 177 serious firearms injuries in England and Wales during the 12 months that ended in March, according to the Office for National Statistics.
