Black Highway
11.13.1510:45 PM ET
This is How AK-47s Get to Paris
France bans most guns. So where did the Paris attackers get their assault weapons?
Late Friday night in Paris, multiple gunmen opened fire on diners and concert-goers as part of what appears to have been a
coordinated, city-wide terror attack that also included several apparent bomb blasts—and which killed at least 129 people.
As bombs exploded and panic spread, one witness described assailants firing Kalashnikov-style assault weapons through the plate-glass windows of the Petit Cambodge restaurant in the
north-central part of the city.
GALLERY: Photos From the Attack on Paris (PHOTOS)
Philippe Wojazer/Reuters
France outlaws most gun ownership and it’s almost impossible to legally acquire a high-powered rifle such as an AK-47, so where did the weapons in the Nov. 13 terror attack—not to mention the bloody January assault by Islamic terrorists on the Paris office of
Charlie Hebdo magazine and the 2012 shootings by a militant in Toulouse—come from?
The answer: Eastern Europe, most likely, where the trafficking of deadly small arms is big, shady business. And where local authorities find it difficult to intervene.
The French government and the European Union know they have a foreign gun problem. But as the chain of attacks illustrates, efforts to tamp down on the flow of weapons have, so far, failed to disarm terrorists.
French police reportedly seized more than 1,500 illegal weapons in 2009 and no fewer than 2,700 in 2010. The number of illegal guns in France has swollen by double-digit percentages annually for several years,
Al Jazeera reported, citing figures from Paris-based National Observatory for Delinquency.
The seizures likely made just a tiny dent in the pool of available weapons. “The fact that a Kalashnikov or a rocket launcher can be acquired for as little as 300 to 700 Euros in some parts of the EU indicates their ready availability for [organized crime groups], street gangs or groups orchestrating high-profile attacks resulting in significant numbers of casualties,” Europol, the EU’s law-enforcement agency, explained in a policy brief.
Many of the weapons flow from Russia via the Balkan states into the rest of Europe including France. Russian firms manufactured the guns and supplied them to armed groups battling each other in Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo. When those conflicts ended in the mid- to late-1990s, the weapons remained—as many as six million of them, according to the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey (
PDF).
Correctly anticipating foreign demand for military-grade weaponry, traffickers defied half-hearted efforts on the part of governments to remove guns from circulation. “Most of the legislation in the region is still in its early stages and untested,” Small Arms Survey concluded.
The worst attack in the history of the French capital is underway. A coordinated assault by multiple terrorists is underway in Paris. Police say the gunmen?as many as six?were armed with kalashnikovs and grenades and killed at least 42 people so far. Some 100 people are believed to be held hostage in the Bataclan theater after a performance by American rock band Eagles of Death Metal. The first known attack was on the Petit Cambodge restaurant in Paris's 10th arrondissement.Almost simultaenously, reports of explosions came from the Stade de France, just north of Paris where France and Germany were playing in a soccer match. President Francois Hollande was in attendance and safely evacuated. At least three people were reportedly killed.
Guns soon became a major export commodity in the Balkans. Western Europe is the target market. “Many firearms trafficked in Europe come from the western Balkans after being held illegally after recent conflicts in the area,” Europol reported. In just one case from 2014, Slovakian cops intercepted a truck trying to enter the country with “a large number of grenades and firearms,”
according to Europol. “The vehicle was travelling from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Sweden.”
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