AK-47s and Uzis being shipped to Scots gangs by courier
DEADLY weapons including AK-47s and Uzi submachine guns are being posted direct to Scottish gangsters – who buy them online as easily as shopping on Amazon, police warned yesterday.
The guns are manufactured and despatched from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and have helped to fuel escalating gangland warfare and ‘county lines’ drug dealing.
This involves gangs selling drugs outside their own cities to limit their chances of getting caught, using youngsters to transport narcotics to deal in other towns and villages.
Police are pressuring Eastern European firms which sell guns legally in their own country not to allow them to be shipped to Scotland. One Czech firm, Bullet Project, agreed to stop selling weapons here.
In the summer, police said a ‘customer’ from Glasgow was caught with 68 ‘blank-firing’ weapons that were ‘readily convertible’, and would have fallen into the hands of serious organised crime groups.
Gangs are also setting up factories making guns from pressed metal, with one illegal arms plant recently uncovered by police in Sussex.
The revelations came as police chiefs met at the Scottish Police College at Tulliallan, Fife, to discuss illegal firearms being brought to the UK from Eastern Europe.
Sue Southern, deputy director of the National Crime Agency, which co-hosted the conference, said: ‘What you see with Bullet Project is that you can go on to their website, you can purchase a weapon and you’ll click that, as you would do an Amazon or eBay purchase, and they can lawfully ship it, because it’s not unlawful for them to possess it in their own country.’
Police Scotland Assistant Chief Constable Steve Johnson said the ‘drugs market in Scotland thrives despite some of our best efforts’. He added: ‘How do you enforce county lines? How do you make a vulnerable person deal drugs for you?’
Mr Johnson said the threat of violence was often used to force people into dealing and ‘most of these threats of violence that have the most significant impact tend to be people presenting a firearm’.
He also warned police were working to prevent the importation of ‘military-grade’ weapons to the UK from Europe. Mr Johnson said gangsters were rapidly disposing of guns, making it harder to track their criminal usage.
Sean Lundy, of Europol, said: ‘The weapons that we are seeing in Scotland and in the UK are not exclusively from Europe, but some of the higher-end, most dangerous weapons systems that we see in the UK are coming from Europe.’
In 2016, a former soldier who supplied firearms to criminals was jailed for ten years. Andrew Steven, 53, ran a ‘cottage industry’ restoring deactivated weapons to working order. One firearm from a workshop at his flat in Ayr was found close to a murder scene.
‘Purchase weapons on their website’