Clandestine arms manufacturing workshop seized: six people in police custody

Five men and a woman, aged 24 to 32, were taken into custody after the dismantling of a clandestine arms manufacturing workshop on Monday, the Toulouse prosecutor's office said Thursday evening.

In this workshop, in Cornebarrieu, a suburb of Toulouse, the police discovered “an assault rifle, three submachine guns, around fifteen handguns, nearly a hundred weapons magazines”, as well as “several kilograms of ammunition of all calibers”, writes the public prosecutor in Toulouse, David Charmatz, in a press release.

“Manufacturing lethal weapons via 3D printing”

“A shooting range was finally set back from the plot,” he adds, specifying that three people in police custody have already been presented on Thursday to an investigating judge with a view to their indictment, which could also be the case for the three others as of Friday. “This discovery is the culmination of investigations which initially focused on trafficking in weapons manufactured using a 3D printer,” the press release continues.

These investigations had already led to the dismantling in Pau of a workshop “manufacturing lethal weapons via 3D printing”, intended for sale in this city, and the indictment of four men aged 17 to 21 in June. They also “made it possible to highlight that these 3D weapons were sold through social networks”, specifies Mr. Charmatz.