A bullet come an' drilled the beggar clean.

OK, I can beat the bacon story. And I don't even need to fisk it. The most I've laughed this week was when I tried to read it out loud. And the more research I did to see if it was true, the worse it got.

I'm not even going to try to rephrase this: I'm not sure I can write about it without commenting. I'm just going to assemble the story from three different sources, because nobody seems to have all the good details.

A security guard came up with a bizarre remedy to remove a wart - he shot off his finger with a shotgun.

Sean Murphy, 38, from Doncaster, had seen his GP repeatedly about the problem and also tried a variety of traditional ointments and creams. But when the persistent wart refused to disappear, he opted for the firepower of a 12-bore Beretta he claimed he had found under a hedge a few months earlier.

South Yorkshire Police are still trying to discover how the Beretta found its way to the hedge where Murphy found it. They know it was stolen in a burglary two years ago, but have no further record of its passage through the criminal underworld.

Murphy, who hails from Doncaster in northern England, had lost his job as a security guard shortly before the incident in March. The wart, which was about the size of a dime, plagued him for at least five years. "It was hurting a lot and causing my finger to bend," Murphy said. "I'd been to the doctors and tried all sorts of things, but it wouldn't go."

He said he drank several pints of beer to build up his courage before carrying out the operation outside the caravan where he was living at the time. He stretched out his left hand, pointing the end of the barrel at an angle to the offending wart, and used his other hand to hold the stock steady and pull the trigger.

Murphy denies that the beer affected his aim. He insists the fault lay with the weapon’s recoil."I didn't expect to lose my finger as well when I shot it, but the gun recoiled and that was it," he said. "The wart was gone and so was most of my finger. There was nothing left of it, so no chance of re-attaching it."

His lawyer, Richard Haigh, said Murphy "has been a victim of his own stupidity when domestic pressures got to him." Murphy was also ordered to complete 100 hours of unpaid community work and pay costs of £100.

After leaving Doncaster Magistrates' Court with a suspended 16-week prison sentence, Murphy said, "I'm happy with that. I know I could have gone to jail for up to 15 years for a firearms offence. My solicitor did a very good job. The best thing is that the wart has gone. It was giving me lot of trouble."