Photo: VCG

A 66-year-old Chinese man was caught by police in Shenyang, Northeast China's Liaoning Province on Thursday after shooting a doctor at a local hospital with a refitted nail gun, according to a police statement.

The suspect, surnamed Ma, shot and wounded a doctor surnamed Bai with a modified nail gun at the Affiliated Hospital of Liaoning University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Shenyang on Thursday morning, said the statement released by Shenyang's Huanggu public security bureau.

The police reached the crime after being alerted and caught the 66-year-old suspect. They seized his modified gun at the site.

The doctor is now receiving medical treatment, the police statement said. The doctor was reportedly the head of the spleen and stomach disease department of the hospital.

The Beijing News said Bai was in the ICU, being treated for severe injuries.

The case now is under investigation. The police did not disclose the suspect's motivation for the crime.

The news has circulated widely on Chinese social media, prompting some netizens to call for enhanced security checks, such as installing metal detectors at hospitals.

Cases of violence against medical staff have frequently sparked public outrage in China. One well-known case involved Yang Wen, an emergency doctor at the Civil Aviation General Hospital in Beijing, who died on December 25, 2019 after her neck was slashed by Sun Wenbin, her patient's son, on Christmas Eve.

From 2019 to April 2020, the people's courts across the country dealt with 159 medical-related crimes, including killing, wounding and severely disrupting the order of medical institutions, according to an article released by the Supreme People's Court of China.

Global Times