DOO GO TO JAIL, YOU HALFWIT
Waiter missed pigeon, shot bar boss
A WITLESS waiter who shot a man in the head by mistake as he tried to hit a pigeon was jailed for 17 months yesterday.
Ahmed Ali was annoyed that the cooing bird was keeping him awake, so he took a potshot at it with an airgun from his window.
But the pellet missed the bird and the tree it was in and hit bar manager Steven McGraw as he sat in a beer garden with friends.
Prosecutor Gavin Letford told Perth Sheriff Court how Steven “felt an object strike his right temple with sufficient force to cause his head to jolt”.
The pellet was embedded in Steven’s head and had to be removed by paramedics. He was left with suspected nerve damage and is still suffering the mental effects of the incident last July.
Police traced Ali, 25. He told them: “I’m really sorry. I was shooting at birds and didn’t realise I’d hit anyone. “Are they OK?” David Holmes, defending, said Ali had been trying to sleep in his flat in the centre of Pitlochry, Perthshire, before work but was disturbed by “repeated noise from a pigeon”.
Mr Holmes admitted Ali had known there would be people in the beer garden behind the tree.
He added: “It was something he did without thinking it through properly. He did not mean harm but harm was caused.”
Steven said he suffered two to three weeks of severe headaches after being shot and had trouble sleeping.
He has also suffered lack of confidence and is now wary of strangers, which is a problem in his job.
Ali , of Pitlochry, admitted culpably and recklessly firing the airgun and injuring Steven. Sheriff Lindsay Foulis told him: “It should have been perfectly obvious someone in the beer garden might be struck.”