Anhui boy critical after shotgun blast to face

X-ray plate of the injured boy.

An 8-year-old boy is in critical condition after undergoing surgery to remove about 90 shotgun pellets from his face, doctors said on Thursday.

The child, surnamed Cai, comes from Feidong, east China's Anhui Province, but is being treated at the Shanghai No. 9 People's Hospital after accidentally shooting himself while playing with his parents' shotgun.

Doctors performed a six-hour operation on Wednesday afternoon to remove the pellets from the child's face, as well as fragments of broken bone and teeth. He is now recuperating in intensive care and will undergo a second operation in about a week's time, hospital officials told Shanghai Daily.

"There were so many pellets, it was like picking up sesame seeds," said Dr Tian Zhuoping, the hospital's vice president.

"We've had similar cases before but this was extreme. We had to remove about 90 pellets," he said.

The blast destroyed the skin and muscle on the whole right side of Cai's face, while his right eye socket was also damaged, he said.

As a result of the infection caused by the polluted material, Cai experienced a rapid heartbeat and fever, Tian said.

"But we couldn't remove all of the pellets in one go," he said.

"We will carry out a second operation in about a week."

Once the child has recovered from the initial procedures, he will require a substantial amount of reconstructive surgery, which is likely to be costly, Tian said.

According to xinmin.cn, Cai was admitted to Anhui Provincial Hospital in Hefei at 4pm on Tuesday, before traveling by ambulance to Shanghai in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

As Cai's parents have so far declined to talk to the media, the exact cause of the accident is unknown. However, Dr Ji Guoping — who is part of an experts' group set up by the Shanghai hospital to discuss the case — said in his microblog that Cai was imitating a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and that the gun had gone off as he was loading it with firecrackers.

Dr Xie Ting, another of the experts, said in his blog that Cai's parents claimed not to have seen exactly what happened, and that they were alerted to it only after they heard the boy screaming.

But there was clearly some confusion, he said.

"At first they said it was a toy gun, but then said it was an old weapon they had found. Later still, they claimed the gun went off by accident when Cai was playing with another child," he said.

"From the pellets and the wound, it looks like a homemade shotgun, the sort that farmers typically use to hunt rabbits," he said.

Shanghai police said that because the incident took place in Anhui, they will not conduct an investigation.

Police in Feidong and Hefei said they had not received any reports of such a shooting.