A man who shot dead his six-year-old great-grandson with an unlicensed air rifle has been jailed.

Albert Grannon, 78, fired the weapon into Stanley Metcalf's stomach during a family gathering in July last year.

The youngster said "you shot me granddad" as shocked relatives responded to the sound of a loud bang in the house, Sheffield Crown Court heard.

During emotional scenes in court, Stanley's mother Jenny Dees, who is Grannon's granddaughter, said he had never apologised.

"Granddad surely has some inkling of some of the pain we are going through, as he has lost a son himself, but never once has he said sorry to us," she said.

Sentencing him to three years in prison, the judge told him: "You ended a young life and you brought lifelong grief and misery to his parents and to the whole of his family.

"What you did was obviously a very dangerous thing to do. Why on Earth did you do it?"

John Elvidge QC, prosecuting, said the defendant kept the gun in a cupboard with a curtain over it at his home in Sproatley, East Yorkshire, and it was normally left loaded.

He said members of the family who were in his garden heard a loud bang and rushed in to find Stanley bent over in the kitchen with a wound the size of a 5p piece in his stomach.

Mr Elvidge said the pellet from the .22 rifle had gone all the way through, severing an artery.

Stanley's condition deteriorated in the ambulance and he died within two hours, the court heard.

The prosecutor said Grannon told police that the gun went off as he was checking whether it was loaded, and the pellet must have ricocheted off the floor.

But, he said, forensic tests showed that this could not have been the case.

In court on Tuesday, the judge gave Paul Genney, defending, time to go to see Grannon to get a final version from him of what happened on July 26 last year.

Mr Genney returned to court and said: "He held the rifle and checked by squeezing the trigger to see if it was loaded, whilst pointing the rifle at the child, but not, of course, deliberately."

The court heard how Stanley's extended family had been split by the incident and some relatives sat in the court itself while others were in the overhanging public gallery.

Many were in tears as the sentence was passed.

As he was taken down, one woman shouted from the balcony: "Love you Dad."

Grannon, who admitted manslaughter at a previous hearing, showed no emotion as he stood to be sentenced.

Additional reporting by Press Association