A patient who fired a crossbow at a UK GP, after blaming the doctor for his father’s death just days earlier, has been jailed for 20 years.

Mark Waterfall burst into the rooms of Dr Gary Griffith in Watford, north of London, last July and shot him in the stomach, yelling: “You killed my father, I am going to kill you.”

In sentencing Waterfall, St Albans Crown Court Judge Stephen Warner said: “You fired the bolt into his abdomen from a distance of about five feet,” according to a report on Pulse, the UK-based GP news website and magazine.

“When you did, you intended to kill him. It was pure good fortune that you didn’t succeed.”