Weapons, Gangs and Murder: The Balkan Guns Fuelling Europes Violence

Weapons, Gangs and Murder: The Balkan Guns Fuelling Europe's Violence. Al Jazeera People and Power Documentary, 25 minutes. A chilling investigation tracing the journey of illegal firearms from post-war Yugoslavia through criminal networks in the Balkans, across open European borders, and into the hands of teenagers on the streets of Sweden.

Swedish Child Soldiers

The documentary opens in Sweden, a country that has become tragically accustomed to gun violence. Kai, a high school principal south of Stockholm, arrives at work one September morning in 2024 to find police cars and ambulances surrounding his school. A 15 year old boy has shot his 14 year old classmate in the face in the school toilets. The victim survived after a bullet was found lodged in his mouth. The weapon was a Zastava M70, a semi-automatic pistol made in Serbia. A week before the shooting, the teenage gunman had taken on a contract to kill someone. Like many other young people, he had been lured into a culture of guns and criminality through music videos and online content. Kai describes these children as Swedish child soldiers. It is something he never expected to see. The gangs recruit openly through social media, posting what amount to job advertisements saying things like looking for a shooter. To prove the job is done, teenagers film themselves committing murders and upload the footage online. The big tech platforms do virtually nothing to stop it.

Innocent Casualties

Michael Janicki was not part of any gang. He was shot and killed in front of his own son after a confrontation with gang members. His mother describes receiving a phone call from her son while she was at a birthday party six hours away. The police told her Michael had been in an accident. His sister then confirmed the devastating truth. He had been shot dead. The six hour drive back to Stockholm was the most horrifying experience of her life, knowing her grandson had watched his father die. Police later found a photograph of the shooter on the phone of one of his friends. The weapon was an ECL 9mm, a starting gun originally designed to fire blanks that had been converted to fire live ammunition. This modification is a growing trend. Blank-firing guns are legally purchased on the EU market, smuggled into the Western Balkans where they are converted, and then smuggled back into Europe as functioning weapons.

The Balkan Pipeline

The documentary follows the trail of illegal weapons all the way back to the source. The most common route leads to the former Yugoslavia, where millions of firearms were lost during and after the wars of the 1990s. These weapons are still circulating, cheap, readily available, and in high demand. In Montenegro, a small country with one of the highest rates of civilian gun ownership in the world, an estimated 40 percent of firearms are owned illegally. The criminal groups that use them are extremely violent and ready to use guns whenever it serves their interests. Journalists speak to an arms trafficker who agrees to appear on camera with his identity hidden. He shows them weapons he sells on the black market and discusses prices. A standard AK-47 from the factory in Serbia can be obtained for remarkably little money. The trafficker explains that many weapons come directly from the Zastava arms factory in Kragujevac, Serbia, the largest weapons manufacturer in the Balkans. Millions of guns produced there during the wars remain on the black market, and new ones come off the production lines every day.

A Factory Without Accountability

Zastava Arms is a state-owned weapons factory that received the lowest possible rating from Transparency International, just two out of 112 points. There is no anti-corruption programme, no oversight, no disclosure of its agents. It operates with virtually zero accountability. Research from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime shows that Zastava weapons routinely appear in the Western Balkans black market. They are cheap, reliable, and devastatingly effective. Four of the weapons used in the 2015 Paris attacks that killed 13 people were Zastava M70 assault rifles. Another Zastava weapon was used by a gunman in Vienna in 2020 who killed four people. The connection between this factory and gun violence across Europe is direct and well documented.

Montenegro, Crime and Politics

Montenegro is described by one analyst as a mafia state, a place where the mafia does not just exist alongside institutions but has its own institutions. The documentary visits the port city of Bar, long known as both a tourist resort and a gateway for smuggling. Behind the port, hidden warehouses tucked out of sight behind a bluff suggest that anyone wanting to traffic weapons through the port would need special licences. Further along the coast, flashy marinas hint at the profits of illicit trade. Montenegro's former president Milo Djukanovic, one of Europe's longest serving leaders, has long denied allegations that smuggling networks sustained his rule for decades. He lost the presidency in 2023, but the criminal networks that operated under his watch remain fully intact. A new government says it is trying to crack down, but the legacy of the former regime runs deep and many of its tentacles have adapted to the new circumstances.

Borders That Mean Nothing

The documentary's most striking sequence follows the smuggling route from the Balkans into the European Union. Journalists drive through a remote mountain road near the town of Rozaje in Montenegro, a crucial junction for weapons, drugs, and people trafficking. The road passes through dense forest and comes close to the borders of Montenegro, Serbia, and Kosovo simultaneously. One road, three countries, no signs, no barriers. The borders are meaningless. From there, the route into the EU is well established. The journalists film a crossing on the Montenegro-Croatia border and watch as not a single car is searched. They are waved through without so much as a glance. From Croatia, it is smooth sailing into the Schengen zone with no further border checks. Weapons move piece by piece from country to country along motorways, hidden in ordinary traffic. They travel in commercial trucks, on buses hidden in luggage, or in private cars.

Sweden's Unanswered Questions

Swedish customs officers manage to intercept only a fraction of the weapons entering the country. In one seizure from September 2024, officers stopped a car driven by a woman in her 50s coming over the bridge from Denmark. In the trunk they found two Zastava M70 assault rifles. In a picnic basket, two Zastava M57 pistols. Next to the basket, a container holding 16 hand grenades. These are the most common weapons seized in Swedish criminal networks. But the question that haunts Swedish officials is why Sweden in particular has become the epicentre of this violence, and not neighbouring countries like Denmark, Norway, or Finland. No one has a satisfying answer. Politicians have moved past asking if a school shooting will happen and now plan for when it will happen.

SEESAC, a UN affiliated gun control organisation, tracks firearms incidents across the region. Over 2,600 people have been threatened with firearms, over 2,000 injured, and almost 800 killed. They organise weapons destruction events each year, removing thousands of guns from circulation, but the supply shows no sign of slowing.

Key Takeaways

The pipeline from Balkan weapons factories to European streets is direct, cheap, and barely policed. Zastava Arms in Serbia operates with almost zero transparency while its products fuel mass shootings across Europe. Montenegro's criminal networks survived a change in government and continue to facilitate smuggling. EU border controls along the Balkan route are effectively non-existent, with journalists able to cross without any inspection. Sweden has become the unlikely epicentre of gun violence fuelled by these weapons, with teenagers being recruited as contract killers through social media. Blank-firing guns legally sold in the EU are being converted to fire live rounds and smuggled back in. The scale of the problem is enormous, and none of the current measures appear remotely adequate to stop it.