AN ELDERLY couple are the latest victims of gun crime in Guernsey. The Vale couple, who asked not to be named for fear of further attacks, discovered that two window panes at their home had been smashed.

At least one had apparently been shot at with an air rifle or BB-type gun, said police.

The retired husband and wife were woken by a sudden noise at around 2am or 3am one morning last week but were initially unable to find out what had disturbed them.

They discovered the damage to the panes of their ground floor study only yesterday.

‘We don’t know why anyone would do it,’ said the woman, a retired civil servant.

‘No one would want to target us,’ said her husband.

‘When I heard the noise in the middle of the night, I turned to my husband and said, ﾓDid you hear something?”,’ said the woman.

The man, who formerly worked in the banking sector, then went downstairs to investigate, thinking initially that perhaps something had fallen down in the bathroom.

‘A connection on the shower kept coming off and I thought something might have been knocked over, but it wasn’t that,’ he said.

‘So I checked all the rooms, saw nothing and went back to bed.’

‘If you hadn’t remembered waking up that night, we might not have even realised that the window might have been shot at,’ said his wife.

She added that she often sat in a chair just feet away from the window pane that was smashed – had she done so that night, she might have been directly in the firing line.

‘I do often sit there with the lights on and the curtains open,’ she said.

‘It’s annoying that people can do this sort of thing – leaving you with a hole in the window for fun,’ said her husband.

The couple agreed that given the time of the attack on their home, they did not think it was likely the perpetrator would be caught.

‘It’s the same as the vandalism carried out in the middle of the night at the beach toilets,’ said the husband.

‘You wonder what the mentality of the people could possibly be.’

They thought there had been either two individuals shooting at the windows or one who was determined to break through the glass.

‘I used to go to St Martin’s Air Rifle Club,’ said the man.

‘I had to carry my rifle home in a case, otherwise the police would have been straight after me.’

His wife added: ‘We understand that children can be mischievous – we used to be, knocking on people’s doors and running away, that sort of thing.

‘But never anything criminal like this.’

Although no pellet from an air weapon has yet been recovered, police have visited the couple and are continuing to investigate.

‘It’s upsetting that people have got nothing better to do than go out and frighten old people,’ said Inspector Tom Makins, who confirmed that since 1 August there had been nine reported incidents in which an air rifle-type weapon had allegedly been used.

Since that date one individual has been charged with a number of related offences, he added.