UK-bound guns seized as Britain beefs up security in Albanian port
Albanian criminals are attempting to smuggle weapons into the UK through an Adriatic port where the British Government has been forced to beef up security.
Police found eight Glock pistols with ammunition hidden in a food hamper in a van in the port of Durres on the Albanian coast on Monday night.
The weapons were detected by Albanian police using a scanner before the Mercedes Benz van was due to embark on a ferry to Ancona in Italy. The van had UK plates and, according to police, was on its way to an address in Luton in Britain.
The driver has been arrested and is being questioned by police but claims no knowledge of the guns, according to Albanian media. He is said to have told police he was merely told to deliver the food hamper to the British relatives of an Albanian man whom he claimed he had never met before.
Durres, a port undergoing a major expansion by the Albanian government, was identified as a potential source of smuggling by the UK and Albania last year, according to a cache of police emails leaked at the time.
The emails revealed that Border Force planned to deploy officers to Albania to help “scope” plans for the port’s expansion and to advise on security measures that could be taken to combat illegal immigration and the import of cocaine into Europe by organised crime gangs.
They showed Border Force’s role would focus on the Albanian ports of Durres and Porto Romano to “assess the container traffic, Ro/Ro, passengers, port and law enforcement IT systems, and the current operational capabilities that exist within the port”.
Police say Albanian criminals have been running large parts of the UK cocaine market in the UK for the past two decades but, in recent years, have also supplanted the Vietnamese as the biggest suppliers of UK-grown cannabis through “farms” hidden in houses and industrial estates.
Last autumn the National Crime Agency (NCA) warned a “significant number” of the Albanians in the UK had entered illegally to work in the “grey” market or for organised criminal drug gangs and were sending back “hundreds of millions of pounds” of cash a year to Albania.
Third of small boat migrants were Albanian
Albanians accounted for about a third of the 45,000 migrants who crossed the Channel in small boats last year.
According to Top Channel TV in Albania, police sources named the driver as a 34-year-old from Tirana, whose van and phone had been impounded by police. Officers were alerted by the scanner before a search of the vehicle revealed the eight Glock pistols.
Police are trying to locate the owner of the company transporting goods from Albania to the EU and the UK.
A local crime reporter claimed the driver had told police that “a person not known to me [came] with a box saying he needed it to be delivered to a relative in the UK.