POLICE are hunting a gunman who shot a nurse in the back with a high-powered air rifle.

Mum Emma Moynehan, 23, of Manor Road, Upper Beeding, was hit by a pellet fired from a moving car in Lyndhurst Road as she left Worthing Hospital. Police called it a "mindless and cowardly" attack which could easily have caused more serious injury. Emma's thick coat saved her. She escaped with severe bruising but will probably be off work for two days. She had just finished work on the children's ward and was walking back with two colleagues. She said: "I heard a sound like a branch snapping and it felt as though I had been stung, only more intense. It jolted me and I screamed." Her shocked friends found the pellet still caught in her coat, and rushed her back to the hospital's accident department. Emma said: "It was lucky that my friend wasn't hit because she was just wearing a cardigan. I just can't believe someone would do something like this." Police think it was an isolated incident and are not linking it to another attack on a nurse at the weekend when hooligans threw a rock through Suzette Marshall's windscreen as she drove home through Worthing.

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