Bosnian Arms Still Worryingly Available, Experts Say

Arms are plentiful in Bosnia owing to the country’s wartime history. Photo: brian.ch/Flickr

Firearms remain worryingly plentiful in Bosnia, according to experts, and are bought and taken across state borders in small but regular deliveries, ending up in foreign criminal circles and even in terrorist attacks.

“It is quite easy for people to get their hands on these weapons,” said Paul James, director of the UK-based ballistics intelligence firm, Arquebus Solutions, which monitors arms trafficking from the Balkans among other regions.

According to the UN Development Project, an estimated 750,000 unregistered firearms remain in Bosnia, mostly left over from the war of 1992 to 1995. They sell for several times their original value in the UK and other foreign markets, where the availability of firearms is low.

James said this explains why ammunition from Bosnia cropped up in the Islamist terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, France. 

Despite crackdowns, firearms still leave Bosnia, smuggled out by organized crime gangs, with as few as three or four guns at a time secreted in car boots or in luggage on coaches. They can then be moved around relatively easily.

There is growing evidence, James added, of a cross-over between organized crime networks and terrorist groups, which was not previously thought to be the case.

Firearms from Bosnia came under the spotlight again after Serbia’s Interior Minister, Nebojsa Stefanovic, announced that Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic had been “moved to safety” after Serbian police found a large quantities of weapons hidden close to his family home in Jajinci, near Belgrade. Read more: Serbian PM ‘Moved to Safety’ After Weapons Find

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic. Photo: Darko Vojinovic/AP

The Serbian daily Blic reported that an investigation had found that part of the cache of several hand grenades, a bazooka and ammunition for machine-guns and snipers, came from Bosnia.

Slobodan Boskovic, project coordinator at the South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms, SEESAC, said that although it was hard to track their path, the story was not so simple.

Strictly speaking, “they are not Bosnian arms,” Boskovic told BIRN in a written statement. “They are arms of the Former Yugoslav Army or of the Territorial Defence of the SFRY. Once they were produced, they were shipped to the Bosnia and Herzegovina warehouses of those formations.”

Most of these arms were legal and secure before the 1992-5 conflict and were compromised only when the fighting broke out, he added.

Obtaining an illegal firearm in Bosnia today is no longer straightforward, if you are not well-connected in the criminal underworld, said Boskovic, particularly because of recent law enforcement efforts linked to security concerns.

Firearms now are usually purchased in small numbers so as not to attract attention. 

However, the high unemployment and poverty rate in the country creates a great incentive to get involved in arms smuggling, even for those not previously part of organized crime gangs. 

“The fact is that a piece of firearm that could have a black market value of few hundred euros in the region, once it is trafficked to the EU can easily triple or quadruple in price,” he said.

As for why so many people in Bosnia keep hold of unregistered weapons, some ordinary citizens retain them out of fear for their personal security

Criminal networks are a different matter. “These networks are in constant possession … of adequate quantities and varieties of firearms necessary for different purposes – from side-arms for personal protection to military-grade assault weaponry – as was confiscated the other day,” said Boskovic.    

Recent weapons seizures in the Sarajevo area show Bosnians still possess hundreds of thousands of illegal firearms from the 1990s war, which pose a threat to public safety and national security. Read more: Seizures Show Bosnians Still Hoarding Illegal Guns  

Bosnian officials wiith seized weapons intended for destruction. Photo: UNDP BiH

Meanwhile, radical Muslim groups in Bosnia, which are thought to have been introduced when fighters from Gulf countries came to fight on the side of Bosnian Muslims during the war, have also come under the spotlight because of links uncovered to terrorist attacks abroad.

Bosnian security specialist Predrag Ceranic commented in the Serbian daily Blic on November 3 that many major terrorist attacks, including those in Paris, Madrid and the US, had a Bosnian connection – be it firearms or some kind of involvement of Bosnian citizens. 

Timeline of Bosnian links to terrorist attacks 

September 2001

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, named as the “principal architect” behind the 9/11 terror attacks in the US in 2001, was born in Pakistan but fought in the Bosnian war of 1992 to 1995 and obtained Bosnian citizenship in 1995. He is now held at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

The remains of 9/11 attack. Photo: US Navy photo by Chief Photographer s Mate Eric J Tilford

March 2004

In March 2004, simultaneous bombings on the Madrid train network that killed 192 people were carried out by an al-Qaeda inspired terrorist cell. Several of those responsible were found by Spanish authorities to have fought alongside Bosnian Muslims in the Bosnian war, according to former NSA security expert John Schindler.

The Atocha station memorial in Madrid. Photo: Losmininos/Flickr

January 2015

In January 2015, Bosnian bullets were used by the terrorists who launched a brutal assault on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing 12 people. Read more: Paris Terror Attack Victims Mourned in Balkans

A woman lights a candle near a sign that read in French “I am Charlie” during a demonstration in solidarity in Pristina. Photo: Visar Kryeziu/AP

December 2015

Research carried out by Amnesty International showed in December 2015 how Bosnian arms were finding their way in the hands of ISIS in Syria.

“Between March 2005 and December 2006, a variety of small arms and light weapons were exported from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia to the UK, and then re-exported to Iraq,” the report said.  Read more: ISIS Using Bosnian, Serbian Weapons, Amnesty Says

Montenegro will also form a special team tasked with identifying and monitoring potential members of violent extremist groups. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

January 2016

The Bosnian community in St Louis, US, reeled after a court jailed a Bosnian immigrant for three years last January for financing ISIS via another Bosnian immigrant, who gave the money to an intermediary in Istanbul. Read more: US Jails Bosnian Immigrant for Financing ISIS

A court in Saint Louis in the US on Tuesday jailed a 43-year old Bosnian immigrant, Jasminka Ramic, for three years for financially supporting ISIS terrorists.Photo: US Police