EPAFlowers at the site of the attack and the text “Sweden, take courage”
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 14:10
After the attack on three Swedes in Brussels last Monday evening, the question arose in Belgium how the shooter could obtain a weapon without a permit. Editors of VRT NWS tried to answer that question and came to the conclusion that it is easy to buy an illegal weapon online.
The weapon used by the shooter, a 45-year-old Tunisian, was a weapon of war: an AR-15. That’s a (semi)automatic rifle. According to Nils Duquet, director of the Flemish Peace Institute and weapons expert, it is striking that the perpetrator was able to arrive. It does not often occur on the illegal market in Belgium, he says in Belgian media.
On Monday evening, a rejected Tunisian asylum seeker opened fire on three Swedish football supporters who were on their way to attend the European Championship qualifying match between Belgium and Sweden at the King Baudouin Stadium in Brussels. Two of them did not survive, the third was seriously injured.
The perpetrator was spotted the next morning in a café in the municipality of Schaerbeek and shot dead by the police. The VRT made a reconstruction of the attack and the hours afterwards.
It later turned out that the perpetrator was known to the law. Minister Van Quickenborne resigned because a mistake had been made by the judiciary. Tunisia’s request in August last year to extradite the man has not been received. Van Quickenborne spoke of “an unacceptable mistake with dramatic consequences”.
It is not clear how many of those weapons there are in the country, says federal prosecutor Frédéric van Leeuw in the TV program To the point. “There are a lot of weapons. You can compare it to drugs. That is also a priority to tackle, but drugs keep coming.”
According to the police, tackling illegal arms trade is made more difficult because the borders within the Schengen area are open. Many weapons come from Eastern Europe.
Buy a weapon
Investigative editors from VRT NWS went to the market to see if they could buy weapons illegally. They found seventeen providers within three days. And then they stayed away from the dark web, a hidden part of the internet. The journalists’ goal was not to buy weapons – which carry penalties of up to a 25,000 euro fine and five years in prison – but to demonstrate how easy that is.
The journalists searched widely accessible online platforms and only looked at sellers who were willing to meet in person or accept cash, to rule out potential scammers. After an hour of searching, they already had a request to meet.
They found public chat groups selling guns. In many cases these were alarm pistols. These can be converted to fire real bullets. The costs vary from 200 euros for a normal alarm pistol to 500 for a converted one. About half of them are sold within a week, the journalists noted.
Nearly a third of the forum’s ads are for revolvers and shotguns. These appear to be less popular because they have been for sale longer, the editors saw. The price is between 1000 and 1500 euros.
Deal easy
Larger weapons and grenades are also for sale on the forum. There were five advertisements of AKs and ARs, including an AR-15, like the one used by the Brussels shooter. For sale for 3500 euros. The editors approached the seller, who was initially a bit suspicious, but eventually agreed. He would send the weapon “piece by piece” to different lockers of a parcel delivery company so that it would be harder to trace.
At this point the editors stopped. “If we had continued with the sale, we might have had to choose multiple lockers and we might have been able to pick up parts of our weapon at the newsagent around the corner. The package would have ended up there next to, for example, packages from bol.com or Vinted.”
Weapons expert Duquet is not surprised by the outcome of the investigation. In a response, he informed the VRT that there are various flows of weapons: from the former Yugoslavia, the alarm pistols that were easy to obtain until recently and weapons from Slovakia. There, the government still had large quantities of weapons after the fall of communism. They were not taken, only disabled. They are relatively easy to make working again. In addition, there is the smuggling of parts.
2023-10-21 12:10:03
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