Belgium/French Terrorists and Their Weapons

In part: Container after Container

Hat tip to Spiegel: The shop where Coulibaly’s weapons were purchased is called AFG Security and it is located in the town of Partizánske, a two-and-a-half hour drive from Vienna. The store is in the basement of a two-story apartment building on a dead-end road near the train tracks. Stairs lead down below street level and inside, a camouflage net hangs from the ceiling. A bottle of Cabernet, emblazoned with a picture of Adolf Hitler and the words “Mein Kampf,” stands in a display case.

This shop, located in the middle of nowhere, is the source of thousands of deactivated weapons that have been sold across Europe. Firearms from here have ended up in the hands of Islamist terrorists in France, gangsters in Great Britain and a man who was once one of Germany’s most dangerous neo-Nazis. Over the course of years. The AFG website continues to claim that the weapons are just “for fun” — for the reenactment of World War II battles, for example. But the key part comes later: “Most of the expansion weapons (Eds. Note: alarm weapons) are originals (originally ‘sharp’) with minor modifications which disable the shooting with original – ‘sharp’ ammunition.” The word “sharp,” in the clumsily written English version of the website, refers to the ability to fire live ammunition.

The guns are mostly decommissioned weapons from the Slovak military. Container after container of these firearms wound up in the hands of companies like Kol Arms, which then converted them from lethal weapons into alarm rifles. By the time the weapons left AFG Security, they were considered harmless — at least according to the law. For the lawless, however, they were the hottest new thing on the market. AFG sold an estimated 14,000 alarm weapons abroad, mostly over the Internet, according to the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). The agency currently has 33 open investigations into customers in Germany.

Many of the shop’s customers apparently appreciated how quickly the weapons could be re-converted into active firearms. French investigators recently tried it out for themselves: It took only two hours for a locksmith of modest talent to reopen the barrel. Doing the same with German-made alarm guns isn’t nearly as easy.

Investigators from several EU countries have been monitoring the shop since 2014 after being tipped off by packages from Germany mailed to Alexander M., alias “Smokey,” a serial burglar from London who has since been sentenced to life in prison. The packages included four fully functioning vz.61 Scorpion submachine guns, which are as small and deadly as the name implies. Smokey ordered the guns from jail using his smartphone.

Initially, the authorities had no idea who the supplier was. They knew only that the person had been active on the anonymous trading platform Agora on the so-called Darknet. British and German police dispatched cyber investigators to order weapons in a sting operation. The tracking number of the packages led them to a mechatronics student named Christoph K. in the Bavarian city of Schweinfurt. Christoph K. is a slender young man in his mid-twenties with technical ability, good business acumen and few scruples. One morning in January 2015, police raided the campus of the University of Applied Sciences in Schweinfurt where Christoph K. was pursuing his studies. Further arrests and legal proceedings followed all across Europe.

‘Unaware of the Consequences’

Christoph K. had been reactivating the AFG alarm weapons in his basement workshop and then reselling them for 10 times the price. Four weeks ago, the Schweinfurt regional court sentenced him to four years and three months in prison. Defense attorney Jochen Kaller said his client had been “unaware of the consequences” of his actions.

Christoph K. wasn’t AFG’s only regular German customer. The company’s weapons registry, which the BKA has obtained, also includes the name Alexander R., 39, who bought two Kalashnikovs and three dozen Scorpions. In Ferlach, a hub of the Austrian weapons industry, he obtained raw tubes for the new barrels needed to reactivate the weapons.

Officials at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the German domestic intelligence agency responsible for monitoring extremism, had already had Alexander R. on their radar. Back at the end of the 1990s, he had been part of weapons deals with a former leader of Hoffmann, a right-wing extremist paramilitary sports group. At the time of their arrest, police seized close to a dozen submachine guns along with five hand grenades. After his conviction, R. spent more than four years in prison. While in jail, he wrote to his comrades that he planned to destroy “the regime of the Federal Republic of Germany.” Police found a pamphlet in Alexander R.’s possession stating that the undercover agents who caught him should be shot and their corpses left with a warning note in their mouths. “Perhaps together with his dick and balls.”

After his release from prison, Alexander R. initially kept a low profile. But beginning in mid-2013, he began purchasing large quantities of weapons from AFG in Slovakia. Operating under the assumption that the company was under BKA surveillance, R. drove several times directly to Partizànske, where he paid in cash rather than ordering over the Internet. On the telephone, he once spoke of a “Big Chainsaw,” a friend of “Beans,” terms a regional court in Rhineland-Palatinate is convinced refers to weapons and ammunition. A few months ago, the court sentenced Alexander R. to six years in prison. His application for appeal was rejected on all major points. Meanwhile, the convict hasn’t revealed the location of the three dozen submachine guns.

Claude Hermant, 52, who had previously worked for the right-wing populist Front National party’s security service in France, also placed a major order with AFG in 2014. The stalwart right-winger has paramilitary training and is also known to have spent a few months in jail in Africa, where rumors circulated about his alleged links to a failed coup attempt. Read the full investigative summary here.