The transaction could just as easily have concerned an old piece of furniture or a used laptop. On January 16, a 24-year-old young man appeared in the parking lot of a large area of Villeneuve-lès-Béziers (Hérault) in order to contact his buyer potential, encountered on encrypted messaging. In its trunk, two 9mm caliber automatic pistols are waiting to find takers, sold for 1,800 euros. Without knowing it, the arms dealer has just thrown himself into the arms of the authorities: his anonymous client was none other than an agent in the research section of the national gendarmerie. Directly arrested, the dealer will admit during his police custody having already sold a similar automatic pistol, a few weeks earlier.
“The individual received weapons from Turkey by delivery of packages, exchanging with anonymous accounts on Telegram. Then he sold them independently to the most offering, without worrying for a single second of who could use them and how”, unfolds with the Express the prosecutor of Béziers, Raphaël Balland. Already sentenced to six times, in particular for drug trafficking, the young man admits having succeeded “to defraud other potential buyers”, by promising them these weapons without ever providing them – he will be sentenced to four years’ imprisonment with a warrant. “This is the first time that I have such a clear and caricatural weapon trafficking file, almost scary of simplicity,” said Raphaël Balland.
The case illustrates an increasing phenomenon: in 2024, the Ministry of Justice listed in its annual assessment No less than 8,147 convictions for “trade and transport of arms” in 2023 – an increase of 17 % since 2021. According to figures communicated by the Ministry of the Interior to L’Express, nearly 23,000 weapons (all categories combined) were also seized in 2023 by the authorities, including 8,534 by the police. Among these, 46 % were handguns, and 47 % of long weapons “which can shoot or not in burst”.
In some territories, uninhibited use of firearms is noted by players in the field. In Nantes, the former public prosecutor Renaud Gaudeul – recently appointed to Bordeaux -, for example evokes “extensive use of firearms, and in particular weapons of war, since 2017”. The magistrate is counting “between 40 and 60 fire openings each year in the metropolis, with a climax in 2019”. For the past two years, the phenomenon would also have emerged in cities of smaller importance located in the region, such as in Saint-Nazaire or Rennes. “Weapons follow the drugs: in 2024, we found it with each dismantling of drug trafficking, which was not the case before,” he illustrates.
“Porosity” between amateurs, delinquents and terrorists
According to A report published in June 2023 On the site of the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Ministry of the Interior (IHEMI), the majority of illicit weapons in circulation in France would come from thefts and burglaries committed to individuals or in armory. On average, 9,300 weapons would be stolen each year, then sold on the black market. “These burglaries take place in waves, and are orchestrated by teams of very well organized professionals, the majority of the time linked to organized crime,” reacts Yves Gollety, president of the Union of Armutors. Beyond the “breaks”, often very violent, the man notes the circulation of false licenses or the hacking of online accounts allowing traffickers to obtain weapons “legally”, under usurped identities. The collectors, finally, who sometimes hold “several hundred weapons in all illegality” according to the note of the IHEMI, can be led to participate in traffic, necessarily leading “a certain porosity between these deviant amateurs and the delinquents, even the terrorists”.
Apart from our borders, the international sector remains a large source of supply for French traffickers. Since the 1990s and the explosion of the ex-Yugoslavia, a constant flow of weapons from the Balkans crosses the borders of the countries of the European Union, aboard vehicles with caches arranged or heavy goods vehicles. From 2012, weapons supposed to be “neutralized”, also from conflicts in ex-Tchécoslovakia, also flooded the European market, sold legally in the Czech Republic or in Slovakia as “white weapons” then “converted” by the traffickers in an artisanal way to restore their lethal faculty to them.
Same procedure for the Turkish “white” weapon sector, largely present in Europe for several years, according to IHEMI: their manufacturing mode makes them “easily modifiable for real bullet shooting”; Many rehabilitated Turkish weapons are entered annually by French survey services. The United States, finally, is identified as a potential source of armaments for European traffickers, who no longer hesitate to have the essential elements of a firearm, sold in spare parts and legally on American sites delivered. In order to avoid controls, parcels are sent to companies domiciled outside the European Union, then repaired without external marking and re -expressed in European countries, including France. In April 2019, an operation coordinated by the Central Office for the Fight against Organized Crime (OCLCO), thus arrests 37 individuals who have obtained Chinese kits in the United States allowing the transformation of semi-automatic Glock pistols into burst pistols.
Traffic uberization
Recently, the possibility of making weapons via a 3D printer also worries specialists. In February 2024, the national gendarmerie dismantled a vast trafficking in craft weapons between the south of France and Belgium, striking – among others – eight 3D printers, seven complete weapons “printed”, construction plans and more than 500 spare parts. Intraçable and lethal, these weapons were sold between 1000 and 1500 euros on the Darkweb and sent by packages, most of the time in spare parts.
“Customers went from simple collector to members of the criminal environment, including survivalists. The members of the network were rather young, animated by a libertarian vision of things, on the model of what we see in the United States”, testifies to the Express General Hervé Pétry, commander of the national unit Cyber in charge of the file, which is concerned about “democratization” and “uberization” of such traffic. In June 2023, a 3D weapon was notably found at the scene of an attempt to set up a account in Marseille.
“What has really changed in ten years is the opening of the weapons market to ‘Tout-Vanant’. This phenomenon could also increase at the end of the conflict in Ukraine,” describes the director of the Flemish Institute for Peace Nils Duquet. This specialist in light weapons control evokes “a vicious circle” in organized crime networks, where the “facilitated” presence of weapons and their “trivialized” use, in particular by the youngest, lead to an increasingly violent response of competing networks. This is evidenced by the unprecedented use, on February 12, of a fragmentation grenade in a Grenoble bar. Arrested a few days later – in possession of a shotgun – the alleged author of the attack is only 17 years old.
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