"marauding terrorist attack" similar to the Paris attacks a year ago.
London and
some other major British cities have experienced a surge in gun crime in recent
months, raising concerns that illegal weapons could filter from street gangs to
extremists.
"We want
to lessen the harm to our communities and to prevent the possibility of a
marauding terrorist attack in the UK," said Lynne Owens, director general
of the National Crime Agency, which leads Britain's fight against serious and
organized crime.
"The UK's
illegal firearms market is still geared mainly to criminals using weapons to
protect against one another or to target one another, but we must be clear that
one gun in the wrong hands in a public space is all it takes to cause
devastation," she told reporters.
The threat
level in Britain is officially set at "severe", meaning that an
attack is considered highly likely, and a dozen attack plots have been thwarted
since 2013.
Owens said one
area of particular concern was the flow of illegal weapons from eastern Europe,
especially the Balkans.
She said that
while automatic weapons remained hard to find in Britain, there had been
increases in the availability of Baikal pistols and converted weapons from
eastern Europe.
Mark Rowley,
the head of National Counter Terrorism Policing, said the availability of
illegal guns and ammunition in Britain remained low compared with the United
States and other European countries.
But he said
police could not be complacent because guns were entering the illegal market
through a variety of routes including the postal system and smuggling networks.
He also said 800 legally owned firearms were going missing every year across
the country.
Rowley said
there had been instances where common criminals had drifted toward violent
extremism, and this was one potential route for guns to reach radical groups.
"You do
get gang members, criminals, people who are already angry, violent, difficult
people causing problems in communities, who perhaps get given a clearer purpose
for their violence by a terrorist ideology, whether they pick that up on the
streets or in prison," he said.
"Those
gang criminality links are an issue that concerns us. We have seen evidence of
it potentially linking firearms into terrorism."
Reuters
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