Inside the 'Ant Trade' - how Europe's terrorists get their guns

Weapons black market is served by army of underworld foot soldiers who smuggle arsenals in bit by bit

When they first pulled him over for a routine check on the Bavarian Autobahn, police saw little unusual about the middle-aged motorist in the rented VW Golf.

Aged 51 and from Montenegro, he told police he was on off on holiday to Paris, and was looking forward to climbing the Eiffel Tower.

Only when officers searched his car under a new procedure to check for illegal migrants did they discover there seemed rather more to his itinerary than sightseeing.

For stashed in hidden compartments was a terrifying arsenal of weapons, including several Kalashnikovs, hand grenades, a pistol and 200 grammes of dynamite.

An underworld armourer off to supply a gangster client for a particularly bloody feud? Or a would-be quartermaster to the terror network that brought carnage to the French capital last weekend?

As of yet the exact plans of the suspect, who was arrested eight days before the Paris attacks, are still a mystery. Identified only as Vlatko V by German officials, he remains in the custody of German police, who are “intensively investigating whether there is a connection with the events in Paris”, according to Bavarian interior ministry.

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Either way, though, the case provides a disturbing snapshot of what security experts call the "Ant trade", the cross-border weapons traffic that arms criminals - and now also terrorists - all over Europe.

"We call it the Ant Trade because in Europe, it tends to be lots of individual operators carrying one piece at a time, rather than big lorry loads," said An Vranckx, an expert with the Belgium-based Group for Research and Information on Peace and Security, which monitors the global black market in small arms. "But if that ant column is big enough, it all adds up."

In Britain, the "Ant Trade" showed its deadly cumulative effect two years ago, when Dale Cregan, a Manchester gangster, used a hand-grenade in an attack that killed two female police officers.

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The grenade was part of a batch of several hundred from former Yugoslavia believed to have been been used by everyone from Ulster paramilitaries through to drug gangs in north-west England. And as David Dyson, a British firearms analyst, told The Telegraph last week: "If a guy like that in Manchester can get hold of this kind of stuff, people who follow Isil may be able to do the same".

Mercifully, true weapons of war are still rare on Britain's streets, thanks to draconian gun laws imposed in the wake of the Hungerford and Dunblane massacres, and to our easily-policed island borders. Indeed, when Scotland Yard parades confiscated underworld firearms stashes, they are more likely to be made up of World War II antiques and converted blank firers - a sign that the gun black market is not exactly a land of plenty.

It is, however, a different story on the Continent, where thanks to the borderless Schengen zone, those involved in the "Ant Trade" face little more than a long-distance commute to and from their supply sources in the ex-Communist countries of eastern Europe.

In the Soviet era, the likes of Bulgaria and Ukraine maintained vast small arms silos in anticipation of all-out war with Nato, and when the Iron Curtain finally fell, those weapons leaked all over the world, fuelling conflicts from West Africa to the Balkans.

In Albania alone, for example, some half a million weapons were pillaged from state depots following the collapse of the government in 1997, while in Serbia and Bosnia, nearly two million illegal weapons are believed to have remained in private hands since the civil war.

Neighbouring Montenegro, the home of the man arrested on the German Autobahn, is similarly awash. Indeed, it may be no coincidence that Montenegro is also the home Europe's top armed robbery gang, the Pink Panthers, whose raids on high-end jewellery stores in London and Paris netted them £100m in the last decade.

But while the Panthers' exploits have made them folk legends - a drama about their exploits, featuring John Hurt, hit British TV screens earlier this month - the same weapons supplies that made them so formidable are now also being accessed by terrorists.