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BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION
RADIO 4
TRANSCRIPT OF FILE ON 4 – “GUN CONTROL: EUROPE’S FLOODED MARKET”
CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP
TRANSMISSION:
Tuesday 24th March 2015
th
REPEAT:
Sunday 29 March 2015
REPORTER:
Allan Urry
PRODUCER:
Gail Champion
EDITOR:
David Ross
PROGRAMME NUMBER:
PMR512/15VQ5547
2000 – 2040
1700 - 1740
-1THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT
COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING
AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL
SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.
“FILE ON 4”
Transmission:
Tuesday 24th March 2015
Repeat:
Sunday 29th March 2015
Producer:
Gail Champion
Reporter:
Allan Urry
Editor:
David Ross
ACTUALITY OF GUN BEING LOADED
PARKER:
This is an assault rifle based on the AK47. This is
actually a particularly short-barrelled version of it, very compact.
URRY:
Tonight we’re on the front line with the authorities in
the battle to stop automatic weapons from being supplied to terrorists.
PARKER:
Firing.
ACTUALITY OF GUN BEING FIRED
URRY:
Assault rifles are the Jihadist weapons of choice.
They’ve featured in recent shootings in North Africa, France and Belgium. So what’s known
about how extremists get hold of them, and what’s being done to counter that? Can we stop
assault weapons from crossing the Channel, to supply Jihadists here looking to mount an
attack?
SIGNATURE TUNE
-2ACTUALITY OF TRAFFIC
URRY:
Travel guides call it a stately, regal city. The Hague,
seat of the Dutch Government, is filled with embassies and mansions, parks and boulevards.
And, tucked back from one of those boulevards, File on 4 has come to a building described as
the most secure in Europe.
ACTUALITY IN EUROPOL HQ – BEEPING NOISE
URRY:
Now we’ve just come in through all the security
checks, had our passports looked at and our bags searched, but even on the inside there are
different layers of security. We are going up in the lift, where there are more security
measures.
ACTUALITY OF LIFT NOISE
URRY:
So just here to the left of the lift, revolving door, but it
looks pretty heavy duty, and there are biometrics here. So the person in front of me has not
only got to swipe a card, he has just put his hand up in front of a scanner and then, when it
has taken the image of his fingerprint and his hand, only then will the system let him through.
ACTUALITY OF BEEPS
URRY:
I can’t follow because access to this floor is restricted.
National law enforcement teams from across the continent and even the FBI are here,
coordinating efforts against organised crime and the trafficking of firearms. This is the
headquarters of Europol.
DONALD:
What we’re seeing now is a change in the type of
weaponry that’s available and that’s of concern obviously to police chiefs.
URRY:
Brian Donald is Europol’s Chief of Staff.
-3DONALD:
In the visits that I have around Europe and we meet
senior police officers, one of the concerns that they often express is the number of occasions
that police officers turn up to incidents and they’re confronted by criminals who are in
possession of basically assault weapons.
URRY:
Where are these coming from?
DONALD:
There are various sources of weapons, you know, a
large number of weapons which were surplus to requirements or decommissioned at the end
of the troubles in the Balkans, you know, there were stories at the time of army bases and
armouries being raided, weapons being stolen, been stockpiled. We’re seeing some of them
certainly coming onto the market.
URRY:
Less than two months ago, police in Croatia working
with their counterparts in the Netherlands, arrested a 64 year old Dutchman, who is alleged to
have had a significant consignment of military weapons in his van. They included heavy
machine guns, assault rifles, handguns, grenades, and six rocket launchers. It was reported
that at least twelve others were arrested in a string of raids. The weapons were seized in
Croatia, but bound for the Netherlands.
DONALD:
The evidence of that incident shows that, firstly, the
weapons are available. Had they got through the border at Croatia then, you know, largely
unchecked, they would have been able to travel across Europe. Fortunately, very good
intelligence work by the police organisations involved allowed the interception to be made
safely, the weapons recovered and the apprehensions made, and that’s what we are about.
URRY:
Those weapons that were recovered, were they
destined for terrorists?
DONALD:
It’s difficult to say. I think the concern that we have is
that, that type of weapon being available on the streets makes them accessible to criminal and
terrorist groups. You don’t have to be particularly sophisticated or particularly far travelled
to source that type of weapon. So the fact is that these weapons are available. In the current
situation that we have today, the idea of home-grown terrorists going out into their own
-4DONALD cont:
community and being able to source firearms, I think
that’s a particular concern.
URRY:
The big worry is how law enforcement and security
services will cope if terrorists go on a shooting spree in a city. That’s already happened, most
recently in Tunisia, also in Paris, and before that Mumbai. Raffaello Pantucci is Director of
International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute.
PANTUCCI:
In the wake of the Mumbai attacks of 2008, I think
there was a general realisation that that sort of an attack, where individuals basically armed
with submachine guns just kind of takes on a city in some ways and just choose a few
specific targets to go around on a spree shooting on. Is a very effective way of getting your
message across and is a very effective sort of way of broadcasting, attracting attention, and
that is ultimately what these groups are trying to do. You know, these are groups that are
about political violence and political violence by getting a message out there – well, one
effective way of doing that is basically going on a spree, shooting through some public place.
And so guns and automatic guns in particular, are a particularly attractive sort of tool in this
regard.
URRY:
Because of that, in some European countries there are
now unprecedented levels of security.
ACTUALITY IN BRUSSELS
URRY:
Here in Brussels you can almost feel the tension. As
we’ve been walking around the city we’ve been seeing soldiers on guard or patrol duties,
military rifles in their hands and armoured vehicles parked strategically at road junctions, in
the city centre. And as I approached the main European Parliament building earlier, I saw it
ringed by more soldiers with weapons at the ready.
ACTUALITY OF GUNSHOT
-5EXTRACT FROM NEWS REPORT
REPORTER:
Antiterrorist police moved in at the heart of the
evening rush hour. And quickly explosions and gunfire echoed across the former industrial
town.
URRY:
Belgium is on high alert because it narrowly avoided
another terrorist atrocity. At Verviers, south of Brussels, not too far from the eastern border
with Germany, the authorities foiled what’s been described as a Charlie Hebdo style plot by a
jihadist cell, just a week after the Paris killings. It too ended in a dramatic shootout.
EXTRACT FROM NEWS REPORT
REPORTER:
Inside the building a police officer appeared to open
fire on the suspected jihadists, who had used assault rifles in a prolonged gun battle.
URRY:
It’s understood police had been keeping suspects under
surveillance for weeks, and made their move just hours before they believed the terrorists
were to carry out a coordinated attack. Two terrorists were killed. A third man was seriously
wounded and was taken into police custody. A prosecutor said they’d recently returned from
Syria. It’s thought the plot was to attack a police station. File on 4 understands that part of
the plan was to behead a police officer in the street.
DUQUET:
People were very much shocked and had the feeling
that a domino would start falling down and we would see all these attacks coming. When we
walk through the streets of Brussels right now, there is military personnel all across, people
are really afraid.
URRY:
Nils Duquet is a researcher with the Flemish Peace
Institute in Brussels. He investigates trafficking and the movement of small arms.
Is the Belgian capital a focal point for gun running?
-6DUQUET:
It is one of many hubs in Europe. Wherever you find
organised crime, you will be able to find firearms. In Belgium, we are a country with some
crime. We are also a very small country, so it is easy to get in and out, which is easier for
people who are trafficking stuff. And we are also a country with a long tradition in firearms
production, a long history of legal trade and legal possession. So a lot of people have
firearms, which means that some of these weapons can end up in the wrong hands.
URRY:
Do you know how many illegal firearms there are in
Belgium?
DUQUET:
Nobody does. Tens of thousands, but that is all we
know. One of the problems that we encounter with our research, is that there is no good
registration of illegally held firearms. When the police find some firearms, the registration is
often not well done or not done at all. Which means that there is a lack of good data, in
Belgium but also in other European countries.
URRY:
Brussels has been linked with the supply of assault
weapons to the three gunmen who carried out the shootings in Paris.
ACTUALITY AT STATION
VRANCKX:
We are near the Brussels South station, Gare du Midi,
where there is the last stop on the Eurostar, it’s where the British get in. It would not be the
place where you expect a dirty deal to take place between a potential terrorist and a dealer.
URRY:
An Vranckx is a member of an expert group advising
the European Commission on the illicit trafficking of firearms. She’s been following the
emerging trail of how the French terrorists armed themselves. One, Amedy Coulibaly is
thought to have got a train to Gare du Midi, for an arranged meeting with a suspected
underworld Belgian arms dealer, somewhere in the streets nearby. The only reason that’s
-7URRY cont:
become known is because the alleged dealer handed
himself in to police, out of fear of recriminations, when it emerged that Coulibaly was a
radical Islamist. So how did these weapons end up being traded here? Much of that is still
under investigation by the Belgian authorities. But according to An Vranckx, they were
bought legally in another part of Europe.
VRANCKX:
The precise guns that Coulibaly managed to get his
hands on, probably were purchased in the Slovakian circuit. And that Slovakian circuit is a
place where you can buy guns that have been deactivated, like machine guns. The different
countries in the European Union have their own methods to deactivate a gun like that, and
they are not all the same and they are not all sufficiently robust. What we know, through the
Coulibaly case, is that in Slovakia the way to deactivate a gun is rather easy to reconvert later
on, so that you can buy in a Slovakian shop a beautiful machine gun as a stage prop.
URRY:
So that is a commercial market for it, but the criminals
have worked out they can reactivate it?
VRANCKX:
Yeah, because you can perhaps bring the gun to
someone who is able to reconvert it into a functioning gun, so if a gun, like that reconverted
can circulate freely within the European Common Market, anyone can buy it. Whether in
Belgium or Malta, it’s all the same common market and it’s a gun that shouldn’t be there.
URRY:
Although it’s a common market, different countries
have different standards of weapons deactivation and Slovakia is not among the most
rigorous. Setting a better, universal standard for member states is on the EU political agenda,
but it hasn’t happened yet. And even if they close that door, another one has already opened.
Reading Europol’s latest threat assessment, File on 4 spotted just one sentence which showed
military guns are arriving from the new conflict zones which ring the European states.
READER IN STUDIO:
Some firearms originating from the conflict in Syria,
Libya and Mali are already available on the European black market and these countries may
emerge as major sources of illegal firearms trafficked to the EU.
URRY:
Chief of Staff Brian Donald gave us more details.
-8DONALD:
I am aware of one specific case in which colleagues in
the south of Spain last year intercepted a load of cannabis coming from North Africa, and
included in that load were assault weapons, which were also being trafficked to Spain. If
that’s a first indication of a supply route from the conflict zones of North Africa at the
moment, particularly Libya to Europe, then it doesn’t come as a surprise, but it’s no less
concerning.
URRY:
It is worrying that that might be the tip of some sort of
iceberg, because after the fall of Gaddafi there were a lot of weapons left lying around
unsecured.
DONALD:
But we are aware of that, we are alert to that, and we
are specifically looking to see if we can develop intelligence leads, which will allow us to
address that problem.
URRY:
So how many firearms are actually available on the
black market? Research for the European Commission published eight months ago suggests
there aren’t any credible estimates about that. It says figures range wildly from 81,000 to
67 million. However, the report concludes, arms trafficking takes place on a considerable
scale. And for Nils Duquet at the Flemish Peace Institute, that’s not the only problem.
Is law enforcement able to effectively track weapons across Europe then?
DUQUET:
Well, it is difficult. The problem is that not enough
information is in databases right now. Not enough firearms are being ballistically tested.
Even if you have a crime scene, you don’t always see that much ballistic investigation into
what happened, because it takes money, it’s a costly endeavour. So people have to prioritise,
which means we don’t have all the information on all the shooting incidents, we don’t have
all the information, all the weapons that were being captured by the police. A lot of member
states have a problem with their own national registration of firearms. If you have bad data at
a national level, you will have bad data as well if you start sharing that. Which creates a
problem, because the intelligence that we have on the illegal firearms market is always based
on specific cases, but we don’t have good quality data to actually make a good analysis, to
actually be able to tell you how many illegal firearms we have.
-9URRY:
Then the authorities are operating in the dark in Europe
if that’s the case, aren’t they?
DUQUET:
Of course, yes. That is one of the big problems and I
think it is important that you have a very good picture of what is going on in order to develop
good policy.
URRY:
Last year, the EU finally decided firearms trafficking
was to become a political priority. So Europol set up an initiative to try to tackle it. The
agency’s had to grapple with the various deficiencies we’ve just heard about from Nils
Duquet, and only 13 of the 28 member states are actively participating. But Chief of Staff
Brian Donald argues there has been some progress.
DONALD:
We’ve had over 1,500 exchanges of intelligence
between member states law enforcement agencies with and through Europol in terms of
firearms, and that’s what we’re about. At Europol we support our law enforcement officers
across Europe.
URRY:
So how much of a picture does Europol now have then
about the black market for firearms in Europe? People haven’t been putting in the right
information or some states don’t bother, different police forces have different approaches.
DONALD:
We have a better picture than we had fourteen months
ago. We don’t have a handle on the whole issue. We’re never going to get to a situation
where we know everything we would want to know. I think within four years, I would say,
that we would hope to be much further down the road in terms of having an understanding of
it. And also being able to develop operational policies, operational strategies to intervene
earlier, to secure more of these weapons while they’re in transit, to identify the trafficking
routes, so we need to build a better intelligence picture. That takes time, but I think we’re
making real progress in that respect.
URRY:
For Raffaello Pantucci, at the London-based think tank,
the Royal United Services Institute, Europol’s doing its best. But he argues the need for
broader political support within the Union.
- 10 PANTUCCI:
I think Europol is in a difficult position in many ways,
because Europol’s sort of ability to map and to track things is really only as good as the
information that the various member states will give to it. It would benefit from greater
political leadership within the union. I think that you are dealing with a continent where
there is different gun laws in different places, and so even if the sort of illicit gun flows are
cracked down on, there is the additional problem of the fact that in some countries access to
guns is legal and one can legally do it, and so if terrorist networks or terrorist individuals are
able to sort of realise these sorts of gaps, they might try to use it as a way of accessing
weapons in one country perfectly legally that they then use for terrorist motives.
URRY:
We wanted to interview the European Commissioner,
whose brief includes terrorism and security, but he declined. A spokesperson said the
Commission accepts the need for more attention on firearms, including heavy weapons, and
that further changes to European laws and regulations are under consideration. An
announcement is expected in July. While much of the EU is struggling to get a handle on the
problem, there is one country that leads the way in the field of tracking illegal firearms use
and that’s Britain.
ACTUALITY AT SHOOTING RANGE
PARKER:
This is the 15 metre indoor range. This is where we
test fire all the weapons. This is an assault rifle, based on the AK47. This is actually a
particularly short-barrelled version of it, very compact.
Firing.
URRY:
Martin Parker is lead scientist at NABIS, the UK’s
National Ballistics Intelligence Service. Test firing weapons is part of his job. What makes
NABIS effective is the ability to deliver what’s called, fast time intelligence.
PARKER:
Whenever there’s a shooting, we take ballistic material
recovered from that shooting scene, or whenever a firearm is recovered, we test fire that
weapon and then we load that ballistic material onto the system. To be able to say within 24
to 48 hours whether the gun had been used before and where it had been used before. And
we’ve achieved that, but I think where it’s moved on from there is actually establishing links
- 11 PARKER cont:
where you can clearly start to see where guns are being
smuggled in, where there are emerging trends.
URRY:
Could this be part of the solution to the rest of
Europe’s difficulties in tracking the movements of illicit firearms? Yes, it could but it isn’t.
PARKER:
Well this is the instrument room, so this is where we
have the comparison microscopes and the actual IBIS system.
URRY:
And that is what? A database?
PARKER:
Yes, the IBIS system - Integrated Ballistics
Identification System.
URRY:
And that’s central to the work done by NABIS. IBIS
integrates well enough around the UK, but in order to talk to the rest of the continent, other
member states need to have the same system. And, according to Martin Parker, they don’t.
PARKER:
We can’t link in to France, we can’t link in to Germany
and some other countries which we’d very much like to link into. The panacea would be to
have every country, all 28 member states, actually with the same system and able to exchange
that information across them.
URRY:
And of the 28 countries, do you know how many?
PARKER:
There are nine which actually have the system and link
into it at the moment.
URRY:
So two-thirds don’t.
PARKER:
Yes.
URRY:
If you don’t have systems like this, where you get
instant access to data, what kind of difficulties can that cause?
- 12 PARKER:
Then you’re actually looking at having to physically
transfer the ballistic material or take casts of it and that can take some time. So, for example,
on the shooting in the Alps, it was six months before we actually got the cartridge cases to
check here in the UK. Wouldn’t it be good if all 28 member states did have something
similar to NABIS and the same intelligence picture that we have, and I think there’s no doubt
everyone would then benefit from that.
URRY:
You’d like to be able to track weapons all across
Europe using the same databases?
PARKER:
Absolutely – yes.
URRY:
With Europe unable to get all member states to
exchange meaningful intelligence, and less than half actively involved in Europol’s project to
seize weapons, there’s a long way to go. So is Britain any better placed to combat the terror
threat from firearms? There are certainly tough gun laws, enforcement and sentencing.
There are tight restrictions on the legal use of firearms. Not many are manufactured here
either. And all that has kept the availability of black market guns low, according to Deputy
Chief Constable Dave Thompson, who speaks for the chief officers association, ACPO.
THOMPSON:
Compared to most comparable countries, the UK has a
very low level of gun crime. Firearms are not discharged as often. But of course there are
some challenges and threats. Most of our gun crime is concentrated around the major cities,
but obviously as people will probably be aware, generally speaking guns aren’t as available
in this country, there are very tight rules around it. So you know, while we do see guns used
in crime, actually criminals can find that quite hard to get access to them.
URRY:
When you do find firearms, what sort of weapons are
they?
THOMPSON:
So there’s a real spread of weapons that we see in the
UK. So we do see some what we call original lethal purpose design weapons. We do see
shotguns. But also we see a sort of perhaps a wider collection of weapons that indicate how
hard it is to get hold of guns, so we are seeing an increase in antique weapons, and we
- 13 THOMPSON cont:
sometimes see what we call sort of more air weapon
style ones converted to actually be lethal firearms.
URRY:
From time to time they’re in such short supply that
guns have been known to be passed around between criminals in different parts of the
country, sometimes via underworld armourers. But if gangs can use that system, so can
terrorists. Raffaello Pantucci, from the think tank RUSI, says some British Islamist radicals
also associate with, or are part of, criminal gangs and this would give them better access to
the limited number of serious firearms held by drug lords and others.
PANTUCCI:
We see a lot of individuals with a criminal past or with
sort of involvement in petty criminal or gang activity showing up in the same kinds of
communities that are also people that are ending up fighting in Syria and Iraq, or before that
who were going out to Afghanistan, Pakistan or Somalia.
URRY:
And how much is that troubling British security
services?
PANTUCCI:
I think it is a very worrying sort of overlap between
those two, because of course criminal networks do have access to weaponry potentially or do
have access to the sorts of tools which would make terrorist activity easier. So I think it is
certainly something that is of great concern and when we consider the sort of crossover
between those two communities, we can see why security services are working very hard to
counter a terrorist threat at the moment.
URRY:
Police remain on high alert for guns. They need to
stop automatic weapons falling into the hands of extremists. But that’s a considerable
challenge.
ACTUALITY AT NABIS
PARKER:
Okay, this is our reference collection, so it’s a large
collection of weapons that we use, as the name suggests, for reference purposes.
- 14 URRY:
The National Ballistics Intelligence Service keeps its
own stockpile of weapons in a special secure storeroom.
How many guns have you got in here?
PARKER:
You’re talking around about two thousand weapons
housed here.
URRY:
Lead Scientist Martin Parker showed me the collection.
These are mostly reference items; they haven’t been used in crimes.
So, on one wall, all neatly displayed and racked up, a series of handguns, some more modern
looking than others, and right, right behind me what I recognise from magazines in my
boyhood as a Bren gun of some kind.
PARKER:
It is indeed a Bren gun and behind it an MG42.
URRY:
And these right in front of us here, these more the sort
of assault rifle type things, aren’t they? So what have you got here?
PARKER:
AK47s, but you’ve also got some M16 variants, FN
FALS, Steyrs, things like that.
URRY:
Some submachine guns have been recovered and items
like that, haven’t they?
PARKER:
We have certainly seen submachine guns used and
unfortunately continue to see submachine guns used, but it is rare.
URRY:
These smaller automatics have been attracting attention
because one, called a Scorpion, was part of the arsenal recovered from the Paris gunmen.
PARKER:
It is a submachine gun, but it’s very, very compact. It’s only
slightly bigger than a sort of self-loading handgun. It was designed for sort of use by tank crews
and things like that because it was so compact. It’s a fully automatic weapon or weapon that’s
capable of full auto fire, but it uses pistol calibre ammunition. Small calibre even for a pistol.
- 15 URRY:
On the scale of what the UK sees, I would imagine that
is at the more serious end, isn’t it?
PARKER:
Very much so, yes.
URRY:
So, it’s particularly troubling that Scorpions have
recently been smuggled into the UK from Germany, via a Royal Mail parcel service. Border
security failed to detect them. What’s more, a violent offender was able to run the operation
while he was locked up. He was already serving a long prison sentence at Wandsworth Jail
and Scorpions were his stock in trade.
CLARENCE-SMITH:
The primary officer in the case said these were the
most dangerous weapons she had ever seen reach the hands of UK criminals.
URRY:
Louisa Clarence-Smith is a local newspaper reporter
for the Wimbledon Guardian. She followed the trail of one Scorpion recovered by police
during a raid in her patch, a trail that eventually led to a trial at the Old Bailey of Alexander
Mullings, a prolific offender doing thirteen years for theft, robbery and possession of drugs.
CLARENCE-SMITH:
Mullings was in prison, using a stashed mobile phone
in his prison cell. Just from that mobile phone, that handset, he was able to coordinate with a
supplier who was sending these machine guns from Germany to the UK via ParcelForce. So
Mullings is sitting there with his cell phone. He’d be getting texts when the guns were sent
from Cologne.
URRY:
Because the couriers wouldn’t know what was in the
packages, would they?
CLARENCE-SMITH:
No, Mullings would also get a text when the package
arrived. At that point, he’d organised for them to be sent to a number of addresses, normally
addresses in North London in the Finsbury Park area. So it appeared that he was importing
these guns, matching up a supplier with a buyer and using his girlfriend to deliver the
packages and then obviously collecting the money.
- 16 URRY:
Selling them directly into the black marketplace really;
anyone can then go and purchase that, because it goes through a chain of supply.
CLARENCE-SMITH:
Yes, these guns could be going to anyone.
URRY:
Last month Mullings was sentenced to life
imprisonment. Two accomplices were also jailed. Officers recovered three Scorpions, but
five more packages are known to have got through the parcel system. The Metropolitan
Police wouldn’t be interviewed for this programme. They told us they won’t speculate on the
contents of the remaining packages. They’ve confirmed that they recovered a number of
other firearms linked to this case and that investigations are continuing. But that still doesn’t
rule out the possibility of five more submachine guns on the loose. The postal system is
vulnerable, according to Dave Thompson, the West Midlands Deputy Chief Constable, who
speaks for ACPO.
THOMPSON:
Our concern has to be more original lethal purpose
weapons with a quantity of ammunition is able to get into the UK. Criminal groups may be
inclined to use it or terrorism groups may get access to it. If you look at the volume of
parcels that come into the country, that is actually a big challenge, because if we think before
internet shopping, before we thought about parcel services, people would probably have to
physically bring the weapons in through a port, which is very high risk. Now actually,
probably through purchase online, through an internet delivery and pickup arrangement,
actually the criminal can potentially mask their identity and reduce the threat of them being
personally detected, and I think that’s why Government has prioritised it, and indeed we’re
trying to prioritise that in Europe.
URRY:
There are some serious weapons coming in through the
post, aren’t there? People have successfully done that, including a man who has run an
operation from his prison cell. He’s got Scorpion submachine guns in. So stuff is getting
through, despite all the vigilance.
- 17 THOMPSON:
Yes, so you know, weapons will get through; I think
criminals are very inventive around that. But of course our approach around weapons doesn’t
just stop at, you know, weapons coming in, so we run a lot of operations both through the
National Crime Agency, but through police forces that are very much targeting any
intelligence we get about firearms, are very much targeting where they’re used as well. Of
course, you know, in terms of interception of parcels, we would like to see a really vociferous
and continuous approach to that and I think we get some very good work off our Border
Force around that. But, you know, the volumes and challenge of that is getting harder and
harder and I think we are going to have to look very hard not necessarily at investment in
people, but maybe in better technology to enable us to actually scan and detect, rather than
simply relying on humans rummaging to try and find the commodity.
URRY:
There are scans, but not of every parcel. The courier,
ParcelForce, told us they work closely with police and other authorities, but wouldn’t give
any further details about their security measures. It’s Border Force that conducts Customs
checks on parcels. They’re part of the Home Office, who told File on 4:
READER IN STUDIO:
This Government has done more to disrupt organised
crime and protect the security of the border than any other before it. We split Border Force
from the UK Border Agency in 2012 and re-established security as the priority. We also
created the National Crime Agency, which works closely with Border Force, the police and
other agencies to target the criminal groups behind smuggling and seize thousands of
firearms every year.
URRY:
In the Government’s National Security Strategy and
the Strategic Defence and Security Review, published in December last year, gun running
using parcel delivery was identified as a concern, along with the internet, air freight,
container traffic and ferries. The review described some aspects of border security as
problematic, which doesn’t surprise Keith Vaz, the Labour MP who’s chairman of the Home
Affairs Select Committee.
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The Committee has, in the last five years, when
questioning the Head of the Border Force and other senior officials, expressed our concern
that the reduction in the number of staff at the border means that illegal weapons are entering
the country, and one of the problems is, if you pack a parcel carefully enough, no one is
going to be bothered to open it up to see what’s inside, and as a result of which we are, I’m
sure having illegal weapons coming into this country through the parcel service and nobody
really knows about it because they don’t check.
URRY:
Have you been able to quantify the shortfall, where the
gap is in the checks? What is the specific problem here?
VAZ:
Well you can’t really quantify it, because you don’t
know the sheer volume of these illegal weapons coming into the country through that route,
and that’s why what’s got to happen is, I think, Parliament has got to look at this. Once the
election is over and the Committee is reformed, I would want to see a successor Committee
looking at this particular issue. And once you have the illegal supply of these weapons, what
that means is you have to then equip the police to deal with them. It is a spiral, it is literally
an arms race, where the police will need to keep up with the volume of weapons that are
coming in, and at the end of the day you will have these violent situations occurring even
more frequently in our towns and cities in Britain. That is why we’ve got to step on this and
we’ve got to step on it in a very hard way.
URRY:
All this comes at a time when there are fewer armed
police to respond to any terrorist shootings. Numbers are down from 5,700 in 2009, to 4,900
now. But the threat has increased. It’s a point I put to ACPO’s firearms lead, Dave
Thompson.
THOMPSON:
We do have the right level of resourcing at the moment
to protect the public and to make sure we can continue to deliver our service effectively.
Armed officers are available 24 hours a day for forces; there is very good interoperability
between forces where we need to surge numbers. Obviously more armed officers are
concentrated in the areas where there is high levels of gun crime, usually in the big cities, but
we have quite good sort of plans to escalate that. And we keep under review against the
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threat picture the volume and numbers of officers we’ll
have on duty at any one time, and that is a constant piece of looking at how many people
we’ve got against our intelligence picture.
URRY:
The national percentage reduction is 13%, isn’t it,
which seems quite a lot.
THOMPSON:
Yeah, and I think if you look at what forces are
reducing by, then equally forces are reducing by at least those sorts of figures in some areas.
But we do have sort of national levels, I think here in the West Midlands we do have a sort of
standard and level of firearms resources we supply just for the West Midlands, but also as
part of a national undertaking that we take to support rest of policing, and I think those areas
we’ve been able to protect and guard quite zealously.
URRY:
It sounds quite reassuring, but for Keith Vaz, Chairman
of the Home Affairs Select Committee, reductions in police budgets have taken their toll.
VAZ:
The number of armed police officers in England and
Wales has reduced over the last five years, and that is a very serious issue, because once you
look at those emergency situations, like the Charlie Hebdo attack, you suddenly needed to
involve so many police officers who are armed, and that is why it is extremely important that
we take this area very seriously indeed.
URRY:
I think the police service’s view on this is that whilst
numbers in overall terms may have been reduced, they are now more strategic in their
approach to the deployment of armed officers and the impression they’ve given us anyway is
that there is certainly plenty of those around in the big metropolitan areas where a threat is
more likely.
VAZ:
Frankly, if you ask police officers about the effects of
the cuts in recent years on their service, they are extremely diplomatic. They can’t send out a
message to say these areas are not being policed. But it is just a matter of fact that if you
have fewer officers, even if they are strategically deployed in a more effective way then you
are going to have problems. We do know that in France it took almost 88,000 mostly armed
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police to coordinate the manhunt there, and that is why
our police service needs to be properly prepared. And at the moment in England and Wales,
we have fewer than 5,000. We need them, but we need them as a last resort.
URRY:
We wanted to ask a Government minister about
whether police cuts, fewer border checks, and other issues we’ve raised make the UK more
vulnerable to attack. But no-one was available to be interviewed during the making of this
programme. In a statement the Home Office told us:
READER IN STUDIO:
The events in Paris and Copenhagen provide a stark
reminder of the devastating effects of this kind of attack. Since 2010, having learned lessons
from the 2008 Mumbai attacks; we have improved our police firearms capability and the
speed of our military response. Specialist joint police, ambulance and fire teams are now in
place in key areas across England, with the equivalents in Scotland and Wales, and they are
trained and equipped to manage casualties in the event of this kind of an attack.
URRY:
Britain is proud of its gun control regime, but the
increasing use of assault rifles and other heavy weapons in Europe, new supply routes direct
from the battlefields of North Africa, and the lack of insight into arms trafficking around the
continent is increasing our own risk here. It’s clear we won’t be able to check every parcel,
every car on every ferry, every mile of coastline for firearms smuggling. For Raffaello
Pantucci, Director of International Security Studies at RUSI, there may be worse to come.
For him, the question is how long can Britain counter the terrorist threat, as that continues to
build?
PANTUCCUI:
You are dealing with a very substantial and engorged
threat at the moment. You know, I don’t know that we have really seen the full threat picture
from Syria and Iraq completely mature. I think if we look back at the past year and a half, in
terms of plots in the United Kingdom and the plots in Europe, we’re seeing the tempo of
threats being disrupted definitely increasing, and when we consider the sort of volumes of
radicalised people that we’re seeing and the groups abroad that are keen to launch attacks and
the sort of crossover between those two communities, we can see why security services are
working very hard to counter a terrorist threat at the moment. Having said all of that, we’ve
had more disruptions than we’ve had sort of effective attacks. Which to me speaks to a
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security system that is able to manage this problem as
it stands. The question becomes really how long do they have to manage it at a very high
tempo for?
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