A man is in a critical condition in hospital after being shot by police responding to reports of an armed robbery of a vehicle in east London.



The victim appears to have been shot through a window by officers who opened fire on a three-storey townhouse on the Clapton Park estate in Hackney after a standoff that ended in the early hours of Tuesday morning. Neighbours reported hearing shouting followed by at least six shots.

“During the operation … shots were fired by police resulting in a man in his 20s being injured,” the Metropolitan police said in a statement. It said the man was taken to an east London hospital for surgery. No arrests had been made as of Tuesday afternoon.

The Met has referred the incident to its directorate of professional standards and the Independent Office for Police Conduct has launched an investigation. “Our investigators are at the scene and post-incident procedure making initial enquiries,” the watchdog tweeted. Its spokesman would not say whether a gun was found at the scene.

On Tuesday morning a bullet hole could be seen in the first-floor window of the house on Mandeville Street, and a police officer stood guard outside. Police tape bisected the street, cordoning off the area in front of the house where the standoff took place.

According to the Met, the chain of events that led to the shooting began at about 10.50pm on Monday, when police were called to reports of a robbery of a vehicle in Hackney. Guns were reported to have been seen. Initial investigations led police to Mandeville Street, where armed officers laid siege to the house.

One neighbour whose flat overlooks the scene said he was first alerted by the noise of police arriving at the scene. “I looked at the window, there was someone at the window and he was looking down at the police and he didn’t want the police to go inside,” he said.

The witness described how one group of five officers stood at the door, and two other groups of three armed police crouched behind cars across the road, their guns trained on the property. Another group of officers, with dogs, were stationed down the road, out of the line of sight of the property.

“They were screaming and shouting at him and after a couple of minutes I heard gunshots – bang bang bang, bang bang bang – and then they went inside,” he said. The standoff lasted about an hour until police opened fire.

The witness said the householder was a mechanic of Nigerian origin who lived there with his wife and two or three younger men who he thought to be in their late teens or early 20s.

Another neighbour, whose home is a few doors down from the house where the incident occurred, said: “All I heard was a lot of shouting … I looked out of the window and I saw these armed police. It scared the living daylights out of me.”

The London ambulance service said it received a call just after midnight, some time before the shooting, suggesting that an ambulance attend the scene preemptively. “We treated a patient at the scene and then took them as a priority to a major trauma centre,” the service said in a statement.