Dr Ashish Roy’s residence in Northern Town. Picture by Bhola Prasad

Jamshedpur, Jan. 11: The nightmare for steel city doctors is far from over.

In the third incident in over a month, gunmen shot at and injured a senior medical officer of Tata Main Hospital (TMH) at his Northern Town residence in Bistupur this evening.

Ashish Roy (50), a child specialist, was attending to patients around 6pm when two youths — their faces partly covered in shawls — greeted the doctor and then aimed a pistol at his chest.

They fired a shot, but the bullet only grazed Roy’s chest as he ducked for cover. The assailants fired twice more and the bullets hit the doctor on the waist and right thigh this time. As Roy collapsed, the duo fled the scene.

Wife Prerna, also a medical officer at TMH, rushed her husband to hospital. Roy is battling death in the ICU.

The attempt on Roy happened in the same locality where Prabhat Kumar, a senior doctor of TMH and in-charge of the emergency ward, was shot on December 17.

On January 2, 34-year-old jeweller Tushar Vagadia was shot near Keenan Stadium, which also falls in the Northern Town Area. This, despite the presence of a large number of police personnel.

Earlier, on December 3, a retired TMH doctor, P.K. Mishra, was shot at in Kadma.

Superintendent of police Naveen Kumar Singh, who visited the hospital and the crime scene, said they had started investigations. “It is too early to comment,” he said.

Concerned over the series of attacks on doctors, the city chapter of Indian Medical Association (IMA) has called an emergency meeting tomorrow. The association is expected to take a decision on its future course of action in the wake of the attacks.

Condemning today’s incident, IMA general secretary Mritunjay Kumar Singh said: “It was very unfortunate. The district police should take concrete steps to check a rerun.”