MOSCOW. Oct 20 (Interfax-AVN) - Thirty-three pieces of industrially made firearms and 135 handmade guns were seized in a police operation against illegal arms traders, a source at the Russian Interior Ministry's Counter Extremism Department told Interfax.
"The Counter Extremism Department of the Russian Interior Ministry, the Federal Security Service, the Interior Ministry's Internal Security Department, the Moscow police and the Rys and Zubr specialized units apprehended eleven members of an organized criminal group, who had been selling firearms in several Russian regions," the department said.
Some of the detainees are police officers.
The detentions took place in the Moscow and Smolensk regions. "Some group members modified gas and non-lethal pistols to fire live cartridges and equipped them with silencers. The others stored the modified weapons and sold them to criminals," the department said.
Over 30 searches resulted in the liquidation of four illegal arms workshops and the seizure of firearms.