Accidental firing by a teenage shooter left a physiotherapist with a broken jaw that required emergency surgery to dislodge the pellet during a tournament in Chennai, making it the third serious breach of safety norms in an Indian shooting this year.
After a shooter lost his thumb while filling the cylinder of his pistol in Faridabad recently and a rifle exponent pointed her gun towards the spectators gallery during the Nationals here, a shooter from Bengal accidentally shot a physiotherapist in her hotel room in Chennai early this year.
The pellet got lodged in the physio’s jaw and was removed after an emergency surgery at a private hospital.
“It was accidental. The shooter was cleaning her gun and the physio suddenly appeared there. Definitely, it is the fault of the shooter, I would say. She should have been more careful. But it was totally an accidental case and happened at night,” Bengal coach Koeli Mitter, who was with the team, told PTI.
“I guess she (physio) is doing fine and we had taken her to the hospital at that moment only and a surgery was performed on the jaw. She was in day care for 24 hours,” she added.
The shooter, it is learnt, did not remove the pellet from her rifle while cleaning it and accidentally pressed the trigger just when the physio was entering her hotel room. It amounts to a violation of the safety norms for weapon handling.
The coach said that all the expenses for physio’s hospitalisation and the subsequent surgery were paid by the parents of the shooter.
Mitter said shooters are routinely counselled on handling the gun and this incident was an aberration.