PESHAWAR, Sept 7: The proliferation of prohibited bore weapons has multiplied crimes in the Frontier province, police sources say.

Before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, people in the NWFP and Fata used to carry small weapons, such as 7mm and 8mm 12 bore guns and 303 pistols which did not kill people but injured them.

“After the Afghan war, the proliferation of automatic weapons, such as Kalashnikov, Kalakov, long machine gun (LMG) and even anti-aircraft guns has caused a surge in murder cases,” they said, adding that these weapons were held by the people without licences.

According to police data, the province recorded 3,346 cases of firearms in 2004, 3,748 in 2005, 3,996 in 2006 and 2,700 up to August 2007. These included murders, attempted murders, robberies, edacities and aerial firing.

Most of the cases occurred in contravention of 13 Arms Ordinance meaning that shots were fired from unlicensed weapons. Most of the firearm cases took place in Bannu, Tank and North and South Waziristan.

People in the province have an estimated 1 million Kalashnikovs and Kalakovs and only five per cent of them are licensed. These licences were issued on political basis during the tenure of late prime minister Mohammad Khan Jonejo.

The government had some 10 years ago launched a drive to cleanse the country of automatic weapons, but that didn’t bear the desired results and the menace continued unabated.

A Kalashnikov or AK-47, which had been sold at Rs65,000 in 1976, is now easily available at Rs5,000. “There is no misfire and magazines with the capacity of 75 cartridges can be sued in it,” said a weapon expert.

Markets in Darra Adamkhel, Khyber, Mohmand, North and South Waziristan and Bajaur agencies are replete with automatic weapons made of Russia, Hungary, China, Egypt, Bulgaria, Finland, Iraq, North Korea and Germany.

Sources said the people could get weapons in any part of the country after making an advance payment to the dealers in Fata.

“Though the WAH factory manufactures weapons for armed forces, police and law-enforcement personnel, parts of G-3 automatic guns smuggled from the factory are assembled in the Darra Adamkhel market,” said forensic experts.

They said that it was hard to determine the entry and exit points of bullets in firearm victims because of multiple and, some time, countless shots. They said that the number of contact injuries had also registered a surge because bullets injured untargeted persons after piercing through the targeted ones.

Police said that Abbottabad, Mansehra, Battagram and Kohistan were a few districts where people still used 12, 16 and 20 bore guns.

These types are used for hunting purposes in other parts of the NWFP and Fata.The unlimited trade of illegal weapons has assumed alarming proportion. The sources said the latest additions to this trade are US weapons which were seized from American forces during ambushes in Afghanistan.

They said that police often seized huge quantity of illegal weapons. The seized weapons, they said, were replaced with dummy weapons before being shifted to the weapon storage of the police department.