Yep after the get finished banning .50 and MARS rifles look out home loaders.
Indeed (3rd paragraph).
A lot is made of the quantities. Unless I'm wrong they were legal as Edmunds was a Section 5 licensed dealer.
From the Guardian ... reformatted, but the text is unchanged.
How ballistics traced gang guns back to antique arms dealer
Tuesday 14 November 2017 16.34 GMT
Paul Edmunds, 66, was source of weapons and ammunition for murders in Birmingham and London and linked to more than 100 crime scenes. Police found more than 100,000 rounds of ammunition, guns and weapons at Paul Edmunds’s home.
There appears to be nothing remarkable about the home of Paul Edmunds in the Gloucestershire village of Hardwicke. The modest red-brick cottage he shared with his partner, a health worker, and a small terrier dog has peaceful views across the Forest of Dean. A Jaguar saloon can sometimes be seen on the drive with Edmunds’ initials – PRE – on the plates but it is a comfortable rather than flashy vehicle. This does not look like a gangster hideaway.
However, when detectives and ballistics experts searched Brook Cottage they found something extraordinary. More than 100,000 rounds of ammunition, guns, and weapons parts were stashed in the garage, a bedroom and the attic. Tools for making or adapting ammunition of almost any calibre, current and obsolete, were recovered.
To the astonishment of Edmunds’ neighbours and friends of the 66-year-old, ballistics experts have linked ammunition and weapons from here to more than 100 crime scenes, including gangland killings in Birmingham and London and an attack in which rioters opened fire on a police helicopter.
Police have established that weapons and ammunition sourced or made by Edmunds were passed on to an organised crime group called the Burger Bar gang, which hit the headlines in 2003 when Letisha Shakespeare, 17, and Charlene Ellis, 18, were caught in the crossfire of a New Year’s Day drive-by shooting in Birmingham.
They also discovered that the link between Edmunds and the Burger Bar gang was another unlikely character – a Birmingham-based physiotherapist called Mohinder Surdhar. One officer compared Edmunds and Surdhar to the Breaking Bad characters Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. Weaponry rather than crystal meth was what they traded in.
Surdhar pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to conspiracy to transfer prohibited weapons and ammunition, and is awaiting sentence.
The net began to close in on Edmunds and Surdhar when firearms experts at the National Ballistics Intelligence Service (Nabis) noticed that since 2009, particularly in the West Midlands, police were recovering an increasing number of antique handguns and specially adapted ammunition.
After the Dunblane school massacre it became harder for criminals to source new handguns. One way round this is to use antique pistols with specially created ammunition.
The experts from Nabis realised that much of the ammunition they were recovering had been made with the same equipment. Typically four tools are used to create ammunition, each of which leaves markings, creating a sort of industrial fingerprint.
Among the crime scenes they analysed was the scene of a disturbance in Birmingham during the summer riots of 2011 that followed the shooting in north London of Mark Duggan. Masked rioters fired at a police helicopter that had been scrambled to a disturbance at a pub. A 19th-century St Etienne pistol and ammunition were among the evidence recovered.
The Nabis experts made a connection between material found at the scene of the riot to the shooting of Hassan Omer, 31, who was killed during a private function in a London club on Boxing Day 2013, and to a fatal attack in 2015 on Derek Myers, 25, who was shot dead outside the Big Bang snooker club in Birmingham. The experts kept analysing material from crime scenes – and time and again found the ammunition used had come from the same source.The hunt was on for the person distributing the weapons – and the person making the ammunition.
Attention first focused on the Burger Bar gang. West Midlands police detectives began to painstakingly track key players. Using surveillance, analysis of phone records and forensic science they were to secure the convictions of 16 gang members. Some were caught red-handed as they supplied antique guns and ammunition (the going price, police found, was £3,000 for weapon and bullets).
The biggest scalps were the gang leader Nosakhere (Nosa) Stephenson, who last year was jailed for 22 years, and his right-hand man and chief armourer Sundish Nazran, who was given a sentence of more than 17 years.
Ch Insp Simon Wallis, from West Midlands police’s serious and organised crime unit, made it clear at the time that the convictions were hugely significant. “Stephenson or ‘Nosa’ was widely regarded as the untouchable godfather of the Burger Bar gang,” he said. “We’ve put some prolific criminals behind bars who have been responsible for bringing dangerous weapons to our city. Each and every gun or bullet that we’ve seized represents a life potentially saved.”
But the investigation did not stop there. Police discovered that Nazran had an unexpected contact – Mohinder Surdhar. The physiotherapist was a firearms certificate holder and was permitted to possess rifles and shotguns but not handguns. At Surdhar’s home, police found a complete armoury with substantial quantities of ammunition and the tools to make more. When they went through his papers, they came across a receipt with another name – Paul Edmunds.
Edmunds was a licensed firearms dealer permitted to possess handguns as well as rifles and shotguns. He often travelled to mainland Europe and the US to legitimately purchase antique weapons.
Police arranged to meet Edmunds in June 2015 at a gun fair at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull, West Midlands. Officers noticed two bags of bullets under the table where he was sitting similar to those they had recovered.
Edmunds agreed to meet officers two days later at his home in Gloucestershire. He showed them his armoury in his garage and was not shy in displaying his encyclopaedic knowledge of guns and ammunition.
A month later, officers returned and carried out a full search during which they recovered numerous guns, some that were properly held under the terms of his licence but others that were not. They found two further armouries, packed with bullets and gun parts and bullet-making equipment that matched the “fingerprint” of the ammunition they had found at many crime scenes.
Officers investigated Edmunds’ business dealings. He had been importing large numbers of weapons – rifles, modern and antique handguns, and components – into the UK, principally from the US. He had a dozen bank accounts and police could see he had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds between 2009 and 2015. It is not known how much he earned.
Detectives believe that when Stephenson had a customer for a weapon, he would ask Nazran to source it. Nazran contacted Surdhar, who would supply a gun purchased from Edmunds or another dealer, together with the matching ammunition – almost inevitably from Edmunds.
When he was interviewed by police, Edmunds was defiant, boasting about his knowledge of firearms legislation and import regulations. He argued that what anyone did with the firearms or ammunition after he supplied it was not his responsibility, saying: “I’m not responsible for the actions of somebody that buys some things, like me selling a knife, and you take that knife and kill somebody, and then the system blames me for selling you the knife. It’s your problem, got nothing to do with me. You don’t seem to have grasped that fact.”
He remained defiant in court and when approached by the Guardian, his partner dismissed the case against him as “complete rubbish”, insisting: “He’s a respectable dealer not a criminal. It’s a setup.” She was confident he would be exonerated.
The arrests did not completely stop the killings.In March last year, Kenichi Phillips, 18, was shot in the face as he sat in a car in the Ladywood area of Birmingham in a possible drugs turf row. Another 18-year-old was jailed for his murder.
Phillips’s family were shocked when the Guardian told them that police had linked this shooting to Edmunds. Phillips was about to become a father when he died. In a victim impact statement given when their son’s killer was convicted, the teenager’s family provided a vivid reminder of the human pain behind the sort of shooting he was caught up in – and that Edmunds played no small part in.
