Baby girl injured as gunman riddles car

An 18-month-old baby girl has become the latest innocent victim of gun crime after she was shot and injured when a hail of bullets were fired into a car.

An 18-month-old baby girl has become the latest innocent victim of gun crime after she was shot and injured when a hail of bullets were fired into a car.

She was in the vehicle with her 30-year-old father and his 35-year-old friend, yards from their home, when a gunman ran up and unleashed a burst of fire through the window.

The baby was hit in the leg as up to 15 bullets were pumped into the Citroen Picasso in Hackney, east London at 6.30pm on Monday.

She is being treated in hospital today where doctors described her condition as "stable".

A four-year-old boy was also in the car but escaped unscathed.

Both men were hit as the car was riddled with bullets.

Detectives are investigating the possibility that the gunman was known to his victims and that the shooting resulted from a personal feud rather than being drug-related.

Sources said the victims were not believed to be linked to drugs.

The car was parked in Blurton Road when the gunman and two other men approached it from Chatsworth Road.

He fired repeatedly into the Citroen with a handgun before he and his two accomplices escaped on foot back along Chatsworth Road.

The baby's mother was inside their nearby house in Chatsworth Road at the time of the shooting.

She came running out as she heard the shots and found her daughter, the girl's father and his friend bleeding from gunshot wounds.

All four drove to a hospital and the two men were later transferred to another hospital where doctors said they were in a serious but stable condition.

The area around the shooting scene was being combed for clues by police forensic teams.

Officers from Operation Trident, which investigates black-on-black gun crime, have been drafted in to lead the hunt for the gunman.

The attack follows a series of high profile gun crimes.

On Saturday, schoolgirl Danielle Beccan was gunned down in a drive-by-shooting in Nottingham.

The 14-year-old was killed as she walked back from a funfair with friends.

Just over a week ago on October 2, six people were shot in different incidents in the space of an hour.

Two men were killed and one injured when a gunman opened fire in the Spotlight nightclub in Croydon, south London.

In Bristol, two women were shot in the head when a gunman opened fire on the car they were being given a lift home in.

Donna Small, 22, and Asha Jama, 25, were driven to a police station and dumped outside.

Ms Small remains in hospital in a serious condition, while Ms Jama is recovering at home from eye injuries.

In another incident in the city a man was shot in the stomach.

Norman Brennan, director of Victims of Crime Trust, said gun crime in Britain was "out of control".

Home Office figures earlier this year showed that firearms offences in England and Wales had rocketed from 13,874 in 1998-99 to 24,070 in 2002-03.

Gun crime hit the headlines when teenage friends Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis were shot dead outside a New Year party in Birmingham in 2003.

In the same year, seven-year-old Toni-Ann Byfield was killed alongside her crack dealer father at his north-west London bedsit after being shot in the back.

Hackney MP Diane Abbott, chair of the the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Gun Crime, previously revealed she was sending her son to a private school partly because of gun culture problems in Hackney, the London borough where the latest shooting happened.

In July, a man was shot following reports of an all-women brawl outside a nightclub in the area.