Top gangs getting more guns, warn Police
by Jo Butler, Home Affairs Correspondent
PA News
10 September 1999
Illegal gun ownership among major criminal gangs is increasing, the national police force warned today. Firearms are being stolen or smuggled in from abroad and used to protect drugs or other illegal goods.
Director General of the National Crime Squad Roy Penrose said it was becoming "common place" to discover stashes of illegal weapons at addresses used by organised gangs.
He warned Britain's stringent gun control legislation was only effective in controlling legally held weapons.
When it came to illicit firearms it was almost impossible to know how many were out there and who was holding them.
He warned: "There are sufficient out there to be worrying, but they're not around in their thousands and thousands."
Some of the weapons were stolen inside the UK from inadequately secured but legally held stores. Others were being created from supposedly "deactivated" weapons, Mr Penrose warned.
A major problem was guns being smuggled in from abroad. Although there was no evidence of "shipments" of weapons, they were being smuggled in twos and threes hidden in lorry cabins.
Some were surplus stock from former trouble spots around the world making their way into the UK through European supply routes.
Mr Penrose said it was impossible to stop every vehicle coming into the country and warned intelligence operations were the only way to break-up the trade.
In the past year, one operation against drug traffickers by the National Crime Squad led to the seizure of three Uzi sub-machine guns.
The warning came as the National Crime Squad published its first annual report since it was set up in April last year, showing that it failed to meet its target of 819 operations.
The number carried out was 497.
But Mr Penrose insisted this was because the nature of the squad's work, targeting the most serious criminals in England and Wales, was intensive and had to focus on "quality versus quantity".
The number of arrests made was 1,027, only slightly down on the target of 1,047 and 300 criminal organisations were disrupted by the squad's activities.
Property, including drugs, worth L180 million were seized - twice the cost of running the squad.
Twenty eight of the squad's 1,450 officers seconded from the country's police forces were sent back to their home force for offences.
Around half a dozen of these related to allegations of corruption and one officer has since been charged with criminal offences.
The other offences included drink driving or procedural irregularities.
Mr Penrose said members of the squad, dealing with the country's most sophisticated criminals, were vulnerable to corruption and said there was evidence that officers were being deliberately targeted.
But he said officers joining the squad were already vetted carefully. New measures which will include officers declaring all details about their finances and proactive "integrity testing" were being put in place.
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