Gunmen opened fire at a wake, leaving a man dead and another wounded. They had been standing outside with a group of women, paying their respects to Ucal Chin - up to that point the most recent victim of the city's gangland shootings. Suddenly, three cars screeched into Frobisher Close, Chorlton-on-Medlock. Four shots rang out from the middle vehicle. A 23-year-old known only as Tyson was hit in the stomach and collapsed outside the front door of Chin's mother.

Now funeral arrangements are being prepared for Tyson. A 33-year-old shot in the leg during the drive-by shooting was last night recovering in hospital.

After the funeral, Chin's mother had invited mourners back to their terraced home. Her son had been murdered by gunfire from the passenger seat of a car three weeks ago - the fifth drive-by attack in south Manchester's notorious gangland in seven days. Six bullets were fired from a car that pulled up alongside him close to Longsight's Victoria Park.

In the hours following the shooting at the wake, police described how they gathered the remnants of bottles and glasses from the street while looking for evidence. The manageress of the nearby pub, The Gold Cup, said: 'They just opened fire. It is incredible when you think it was mainly women there. The lad who got killed was a friend of Ucal's, he was a lovely lad. Police gave the cortege an escort, so they must have been expecting trouble. The killers heard about the funeral and took a chance. It looks as if they took a pop at anyone there.'

Neighbours said that no one called an ambulance after the shooting: instead, they bundled the victims into cars and rushed them to Manchester Royal Infirmary. One said: 'I heard bangs, but I thought it was someone tapping on a window. Then I heard tyres screeching, but that's not unusual. This is a 20-mile-per-hour area, but sometimes it's like Brands Hatch around here.'

The drive-by attack at Frobisher Close has raised concern as to whether officers had received specific intelligence that a shooting was planned. An escort of two police motorbikes and three patrol cars had accompanied the funeral cortege to the city's Southern Cemetery.

Witnesses said their presence suggested that the police were 'expecting trouble'. Some neighbours even reported seeing an armed response unit in the vicinity of the shooting half an hour before the assassins turned up.

A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police yesterday claimed that the funeral escort was in the interests of 'road safety'. One local, who refused to be named for fear of reprisal, said: 'Funny that the police were in the cemetery as well.'

The mood throughout the funeral was described as tense. The officers surrounding the mourners were a constant reminder to the 300 who gathered that the gangland dispute that killed Chin, 24, had not been settled.

Yet these incidents were not the only shootings in a night when the city - and particularly Moss Side, Chorlton-on-Medlock and Longsight - once again lived up to the nickname of 'Gunchester'. Two hours earlier and half a mile away on Stretford Road in Hulme, a 14-year-old had been shot while riding his bicycle. Armed police were last night guarding the teenager and the 33-year-old wounded at Frobisher Close in the city's Royal Infirmary amid fears that gang members may attempt to finish off their targets.

The latest outbreak of violence in Manchester raised fresh questions yesterday over whether police are tackling a burgeoning gun culture centred in a tiny but heavily-populated area south of the city centre.

Gun crime is a problem for the whole of Manchester. Police logged more than 3,000 firearms incidents in the 15 months up to May. New figures for the Longsight division of Greater Manchester Police, which covers Moss Side, Chorlton-on-Medlock and Hulme, reveal that guns had been fired 115 times in the 12 months to April. Even before the attacks that followed Friday's funeral, police had responded to three other shootings last week.

Four months ago, Chief Superintendent David Keller, admitted that gun crime was increasing amid reports that teenagers had started walking around in body armour. Yesterday, he adopted a bullish tone in the face of the latest tragedy: 'We've had a lot of successes and we're just having a difficult time at the moment.' Armed patrols, he promised, would be stepped up to try and control the spiral of tit-for-tat shootings. Officers are particularly concerned at the young age of perpetrators and victims.

Patsy McKie, chair of Mothers Against Violence, said: 'I can't believe another mother is going through what I went through.' Her son, Dorrie, was killed in a gangland shooting eight years ago. None the less, she remains optimistic that a solution can be found.

'We have to find why young people are doing this,' she said. 'The fact that they are giving up their lives means they aren't thinking straight.'

City of shootings

· 15 June 2007 Ucal Chin, 24, from Chorlton-on-Medlock, is shot dead while driving his car. His 21-year-old passenger suffers a gunshot wound to his hand.

· 30 April 2007 A 16-year-old boy is held by police after allegedly shooting a 12-year-old girl in the head in Gorton.

· 9 September 2006 Jessie James, 15, shot dead in Moss Side in what detectives believe was a planned attack.

· 22 August 2006 Mark Daniels, 25, shot in the chest in Woodhouse Park, Wythenshawe, in what police say was a targeted shooting. Taken to Wythenshawe Hospital, but dies later.

· 4 July 2006 Ernest Gifford, 45, is shot dead after three men enter his home in Moss Side.

· 13 September 2005 Ramone Cumberbatch, 18, a member of the Doddington Gang operating out of Moss Side, shot dead in Hulme.

· 16 January 2005 Stacey John Lloyd, 31, shot through the head. His body is found in his burnt-out Subaru Impreza in Unsworth.