Man shot through door of NI home is named locally - PSNI investigating possible link to separate gun attack on ‘vulnerable’ woman last month - ‘I need information to come in from the community to help me to rid it of this scourge’

Police investigating the shooting are now probing possible links to a separate gun attack on a woman in the town last month.

Last night around 10.30pm a man named locally as Paul Fleming heard a knock at his front door in the Churchlands Road area.

Two shots were fired through the door and struck him.

PSNI Superintendent Ian Magee said police are looking at possible links to another shooting in early October.

On 5 October a 61-year woman sustained a wound to her head at Bushmills Road, Coleraine, after shots were fired at the front and rear of her home.

“We are examining a few options and we are looking at it in relation to other incidents that have happened in the Coleraine area,” Supt McGee told BBC Radio Foyle.

He said officers were examining links to last month’s shooting “in great detail”.

Yesterday two men both aged 43, were arrested in Coleraine over the October shooting.

Supt McGee said the latest incident on Tuesday was “another horrible attack, a totally reckless shooting”.

“We have people coming under the cover of darkness, in the shadows of the night, criminals coming and shooting into people’s houses,” he said.

“As a result of that we have people in a residential area, families, older people, and they are rightly shocked and frightened about what has happened”.

Police have appealed for anyone with information to come forward.

“I can’t do this on my own. I need information to come in from the community to help me to rid it of this scourge,” Supt McGee added.

The Northern Health and Social care Trust confirmed on Wednesday that the man shot on Tuesday was in a “stable condition” in the Causeway Hospital.

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