Gun Smuggling in the EU
The Paris attacks placed on the political agenda the issue of dealing with gun smuggling/trafficking in the EU. In a news release dated June 3, 2016 by the National Crime Agency of the UK states: "the largest haul of automatic weapons ever seized on the UK mainland." This haul comprised 22 Czech VZ-58 assault rifles and 9 Skorpion machine pistols and just over 1500 rounds of ammunition which were smuggled from the continent via boat into the River Medway in Kent, UK on August 10, 2015. The NCA release said that the guns were deactivated, legally sold in Slovakia illicitly re-commissioned and sold on the illicit gun market of the EU. The NCA describes the smugglers as the Shilling crime group but the grave mistakes made by this so-called crime group speaks only to inexperience and incompetence seen in the purchase of tools to bury the gun cache after its arrival in the UK. The lesson is the vibrancy of demand on the illicit gun market of the EU and the glaring failure to properly decommission arms and dispose of them. The reality demands dismantling those organised crime groups that are recommissioning arms and placing them on illicit markets for sale but which agency will do it as the EU politicians refuse to create a trans EU policing agency when organised crime in the EU is trans EU and globalized.
Europol in a press release dated June 9, 2016 stated that the Italian Carabienieri in conjunction with Europol arrested on June 7, 2016 two leading members of the Ceusi clan of the Mafia an affiliate of Cosa Nostra for weapons smuggling. In June 2015 the Carabienieri seized a parcel with arms and ammunition and in June 2015 French Police Nationale seized a parcel with three pistols and a machine gun both connected to the two arrested individuals. The arrested individuals purchased 160 decommissioned guns in Slovakia legally paying EUR 45,000 for them and recommissioned them by simply changing the barrels as the only part of the firearms decommissioned were the barrels. The question then is where did they obtain new/used barrels from? The news release reports a link between organized Egyptian organised crime and the two individuals therefore between the Ceusi clan and Egyptian organised crime and the Egyptian organised crime groups are migrant smugglers. Like Dah! North African crime groups cannot move illicit commodities to the EU sustainably without the the involvement of EU organised crime and the product mix is migrants, cocaine and heroin and via these networks the Islamic extremists ride.