New York hospital shooting: Dr Henry Bello had a problem with almost everybody’.

The gunman arrived at the hospital with an assault rifle hidden under his lab coat and asked for a doctor whom he blamed for his having to resign. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP

A doctor who appears to have been the intended target of a former physician who started shooting at a New York hospital on Friday, killing one person and injuring six, said he has no idea why he was singled out.

Dr Kamran Ahmed told the New York Post he was not the only person with whom Dr Henry Bello had a problem. However, he said, “he never argued with me. I don’t know why he put my name”.

A law enforcement official speaking anonymously said Bello arrived at Bronx Lebanon Hospital on Friday with an assault rifle hidden under his lab coat and asked for a doctor whom he blamed for his having to resign.

Ahmed, who specializes in the early detection and treatment of dementia, said Bello “had a problem with almost everybody, so I’m not the only one. That’s why they fired him, because so many people complained.”

Authorities said Bello went to the 16th and 17th floors of the hospital and started shooting, killing Dr Tracy Sin-Yee Tam, 32, like him a family medicine doctor. Hospital officials said Tam normally worked in a satellite clinic and was covering a shift in the main hospital as a favor to someone else.

“It makes you think that anything can happen to anybody,” said Tam’s neighbor, Alena Khaim, who saw Tam’s sister outside the home on Friday night, overcome with grief, shaking and unable to walk.

“She was such a sweet girl. You would never think something like that would happen but it happened.”

Before the shooting, Bello sent an email to the New York Daily News, blaming colleagues he said forced him to resign two years earlier.

“This hospital terminated my road to a licensure to practice medicine,” the email said. “First, I was told it was because I always kept to myself. Then it was because of an altercation with a nurse.”

Former co-workers described a man who was aggressive, loud and threatening. Bello warned his former colleagues when he was forced out in 2015 that he would return someday to kill them.

“All the time he was a problem,” said Dr David Lazala, who trained Bello. When Bello was forced out in 2015, he sent Lazala an email blaming him for the dismissal.

Of the six people who were injured, one remained in critical condition on Saturday and the rest were stable, hospital officials said. A call on Sunday to the hospital for an update was not immediately returned.

Detectives searched the Bronx home where Bello was most recently living and found the box in which the gun had been packaged. Investigators were checking serial numbers and trying to determine where it was purchased. 

Bello shot himself dead at the hospital, after attempting to set himself on fire.

Source World News/Guardian