HIT LIST SURGEON BOUGHT GUNS ONLINE
Assassination plot doctor buys lethal arsenal on web How-to videos teach him to activate arms and ammo Target: It would have been carnage. We were terrified
How hit list surgeon Martin Watt easily bought a deadly arsenal of machine guns online can be revealed today.
The A&E doctor will be sentenced for plotting to shoot former colleagues this week.
Yesterday, one of those named on his hit list said: “If he had brought these guns to the hospital, it could have been carnage. When the police told us, we were terrified. We still are.”
Hit list surgeon Martin Watt bought a lethal arsenal of submachine guns online with a few clicks of a mouse, we can reveal. The A&E doctor, caught with a cache of guns and a list of former colleagues he blamed for the collapse of his career, ordered his weapons from foreign websites.
Costing just a few hundred pounds each, Watt was able to re-activate the decommissioned guns in a workshop at his home after watching how-to videos online.
Watt also adapted blank cartridges to make live rounds and modified bullets into dumdum rounds, designed to cause maximum damage.
Despite tighter laws around decommissioned guns, we found parts for sale online along with step-by-step assembly guidance.
Our investigation prompted calls for tighter controls on the online sale and delivery of potentially deadly firearms.
Watt was found guilty of intent to endanger life after a trial at the High Court in Glasgow last month where he also admitted a string of firearms charges.
Police raiding his home also found an envelope, labelled “Bad Guys”, containing details of former colleagues he blamed for the collapse of his career, and the powerful sedative ketamine. The divorced father of two, 62, will be sentenced on Thursday.
A senior prosecution source said Watt bought many of his guns from Eastern European sites. Watt was only caught when detectives received a tip-off a parcel coming into Britain, addressed to him, contained a Skorpion submachine gun.
They raided Watt’s Cumbernauld home, and discovered he already had an arsenal of other weapons, including three Skorpions and two pistols, a silencer and homemade gun powder. A laptop belonging to Watt contained 656 images of guns, gun parts and diagrams relating to the making of explosive devices. Yesterday, one of his intended victims told of his terror at learning his name was on the list.
He said: “I thought about it constantly and feared that he would not be found guilty and come and shoot me and the others. “Had he turned up at Monklands Hospital with activated machine guns it would have been carnage.”
The man told of his shock when police told him he was on Watt’s hit list.
“I could barely believe someone had gone to the length of buying three machine guns and two pistols.
“It set in place a time of extreme worry and anxiety for everyone on that list.”
‘ If he turned up at the hospital with machine guns it would have been carnage. I was scared. I still am – Former colleague on hit list
And he said the nightmare was far from over, adding: “We all worried that he would be found not guilty, right up until the verdict.
“Now we worry that he gets 12 years and is out in six.”
Ballistics expert Julia Bilsland told the trial that Watt’s converted bullets could have caused “lethal injury” and the reactivated Skorpions would have been capable of fully automatic fire.
She said: “Potentially, if the trigger was held for a couple of seconds, the 20 cartridges would be discharged, possibly in two seconds.”
Two of the Skorpions, she said, would fire bullets for up to a mile, with lethal effect.
Watt had tested one of the Skorpions to make sure the reactivation had worked. He took it to woods near to his home for target practice. Watt admitted possessing three Skorpion submachine guns, two handguns, around 1500 rounds of ammunition, an unlicensed air rifle and air pistol, a silencer, homemade gun powder and ketamine, an illegal sedative. Charges that he had a pepper spray and an unnamed noxious gas were dropped.
It is not the first time criminals have built up deadly arsenals by buying weapons from websites, which are then posted to the UK. Three years ago Alexander Mullings used a mobile phone from his cell in Wandsworth Prison to have eight Skorpion submachine guns and hundreds of bullets, bought from a German website, delivered across the UK by Parcelforce. The last of the guns bought by Watt came from the US – and it was this that led to his capture as a result of an intelligence-gathering operation involving the National Crime Agency (NCA) and the Metropolitan Police. Police Scotland said: “The NCA and the Met were made aware a package addressed to Martin Watt coming into this country had a firearm in it.
“That was evidence to get a warrant and raid his house, catching him in possession of firearms.” Police photographs from the time show a selection of guns – both deactivated and reactivated – laid out on a bed at his home. The spokesman said that the purchase of deactivated weapons from the US was a
loophole British authorities are urgently working to close.
“We are still working with the NCA, Met, and authorities abroad to educate companies that it is an offence to supply firearms to this country. “There are several government agencies involved working to close that loophole. Laws concerning the sale of deactivated weapons were tightened up across Britain and Europe last year in the wake of the terror attack on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris in 2015, when reactivated guns were used.
But police say criminals have flooded Europe with 10,000 such guns in recent years.
Harry Shilling, 26, from Swanley in Kent, and Michael Defraine, 30, from Bexleyheath in south-east London, tapped into an underground European arms market to smuggle 31 machine guns and more than 1500 rounds of ammunition into the UK by boat in 2015.
The NCA says the criminal network involved supplied guns to the terrorist who attacked a Jewish supermarket in Paris in that year.
Politicians yesterday said the Watt case showed there was more work to be done. Scottish Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary Liam Kerr said: “We’ve heard a great deal in recent weeks about how safe the UK is when it comes to guns.
“But unless we get that situation right online, the safety of people in this country will be compromised.”
John Finnie MSP, Justice spokesperson for the Scottish Greens, said: “We should be striving to put weapons beyond use and destroy them completely. This case shows the need to tighten the regulations around the sale of deactivated guns, as these weapons can clearly be made lethal once more.”
Scottish Liberal Democrat justice spokesperson, Liam Mcarthur MSP, said: “Police and lawmakers must be vigilant to the threat deactivated weapons can evidently pose.”