An 18-year-old male is in critical condition in hospital after being shot outside a London overground station in East London in what is suspected to be a gangland attack.
The man was shot outside of St James Street overground station in Walthamstow in the London borough of Waltham Forest at 10 pm on Tuesday before stumbling into the station and collapsing, reports Evening Standard.
He was taken to hospital and remains in critical condition.
A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “Police were called at approximately 10pm on Tuesday, July 31 to reports of a man suffering gunshot injuries inside St James’s Street station.
“Officers and London Ambulance Service attended and the man, believed aged 18, was taken to an east London hospital for treatment – he remains there in a critical condition.”
Detectives from Scotland Yard’s Trident unit, which tackles gang crime in the capital, appealed for information on the shooting on Wednesday.
This is the second shooting that has occurred at St James Street station in a month, with a masked gunman pursuing and shooting a man in the leg on July 13th.
Labour Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy tweeted on the day of the attack a reminder to her constituents to attend a meeting to “discuss tackling gang violence”, to which a local responded that she was “very concerned about the high level of violence” in the area in the past few months.
“It’s clearly becoming a hot spot for gangs and needs to be addressed urgently,” she added.
Others responded to the post with their concern over the number of “attacks this year almost [in] the same spot” and that “there are a lot of young families in the roads around St James Street who are feeling increasingly unsafe in their own area”.
One father tweeted that there was “constant drug dealing” and “antisocial behaviour… shootings and stabbings” in the area with “very little police presence”.
The shooting came just hours after Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said the wave of violent crime in the capital had “begun to stabilise”.
The city is in the grips of a violent crime wave since Labour’s Sadiq Khan became mayor, with gun crime up 16 percent and there had been 85 homicides in London so far this year.
Ms Dick said: “We are determined these figures will come down. The trend has been going up pretty continuously since 2014 but it is early days and I am cautious about where we are.”
Dick, who led an operation in 2005 that resulted in the fatal shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes after police officers mistook him for a suicide bomber, was criticised earlier in the summer after presenting statistics to a government select committee that appeared to misrepresent a fall in crime.