Where Belgium’s Illegal Weapons Come From

The illegal firearms reaching Belgium’s criminal networks come overwhelmingly from two regions — Turkey and the former Yugoslavia — according to a weapons investigation published by VRT NWS on 15 October, days after a Brussels police officer was shot dead during a routine intervention. The report, drawing on the country’s leading weapons expert, also exposes a deeper problem: Belgium keeps no reliable figures on how many illegal weapons circulate, or where they come from.

A killing that reignited the question

On the night of 12 October, officer Nordine El Talbi, 41, was shot in the head while on foot reconnaissance of a stolen car in the Brussels district of Jette, near Belgica metro station. He was a member of the city’s Anti-Robbery Brigade and had joined the unit in 2019. VRT NWS reported that three firearms and a large quantity of drugs were found at the scene, and that several suspects were arrested. The investigation has been opened for manslaughter with aggravating circumstances.

El Talbi is described as the 36th police officer killed in the line of duty since Belgium’s police reform. His death — coming two years after the 2022 killing of officer Thomas Monjoie in the adjacent police zone North — pushed the question of weapons supply back to the top of the agenda.

Turkey: converted pistols and industrial-scale fakes

Nils Duquet, director of the Flemish Peace Institute (Vlaams Vredesinstituut), told VRT NWS De Ochtend that Turkey is “an important source country of weapons used by criminals in Belgium.” He identified two distinct Turkish pathways.

The first involves alarm pistols — weapons designed only to fire blanks but which, in certain Turkish models, are very easy to convert into live-firing firearms. “A number of those Turkish models are very easy to convert into real, live-firing firearms,” Duquet said. “They were legally purchased in large quantities some years ago and now continue to circulate in that converted form.” Their ease of conversion makes them readily available to young drug criminals, he added.

The second is more recent and more troubling: counterfeit firearms, manufactured at near-industrial scale in small workshops outside Europe. “You can really compare it to counterfeit clothing or perfume,” Duquet said. “Real firearms are almost industrially replicated in small workshops. Those fake weapons are nearly indistinguishable from ordinary firearms, though they often have no serial number.” He called it a “very recent phenomenon” that has grown enormously in recent years, pointing to new production facilities just outside Europe.

The Balkans’ long shadow

For automatic weapons, the picture is different. “When automatic weapons of the Kalashnikov type are fired, we know they almost always come from the Balkans,” Duquet said. The weapons used in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s “still circulate on our streets today, also here in Brussels.”

Ukraine, by contrast, is not yet a source — despite the large quantities of Western-supplied and Russian-introduced weapons in circulation there. Duquet cautioned against assuming a near-term flood. “The demand for those weapons in Ukraine is still much greater than here,” he said. “Even if the conflict ended tomorrow, based on Yugoslav history we could expect it to take several years before those weapons are effectively smuggled.”

A data gap at the heart of the problem

Perhaps the report’s most consequential finding is what Belgium does not know. “No good figures are kept in Belgium,” Duquet said. Authorities track neither the context of seizures nor the types of weapons involved, and follow-up investigations into recovered firearms are frequently neglected.

He illustrated the gap with a typical case: “If tomorrow a criminal is picked up with drugs and a weapon in his pocket, the police will focus their investigation mainly on where those drugs came from. That weapon is investigated less often, because it is much harder. The databases are not so good, and information has to be requested internationally.”

Because police lack the resources to investigate seized weapons thoroughly, they also lack visibility into the trafficking networks behind the supply, Duquet argued.

Escalating violence, fragmented response

The investigation lands amid mounting evidence that gun violence in Belgium is intensifying. According to the Flemish Peace Institute’s 2024 analysis of its Gun Violence Incident Monitor (GVIM), Belgium recorded 184 firearm incidents in 2024, with shots actually fired in 65 percent of them. At least 21 people were killed and 80 injured. Brussels was the absolute hotspot: at least 13 deaths and 44 injuries, with shots fired in 86 percent of the capital’s 71 incidents, compared with 34 percent of Antwerp’s 29.

“Brussels counted at least 13 fatalities and at least 44 injuries from gun violence in 2024,” said researcher Astrid De Schutter. “For such an increase in just two years, we can only call it very alarming.” The GVIM was created precisely because inadequate registration of firearm incidents has long impeded an effective policy response.

Brussels Prosecutor-General Frédéric Van Leeuw told BRUZZ that firearms “do not enter our country via big containers like cocaine, but in small quantities via, for example, the trunk of vehicles. Or they come back from conflict zones two hours’ flying time from Brussels. That requires many border checks.” He added that “new criminal phenomena demand more forces and resources” and that “criminals resort to extreme violence more quickly.”

What to watch

The immediate question is whether El Talbi’s death will translate into the political action experts have long demanded. Duquet was blunt: “It is particularly bitter that we have so many shootings in our country, and certainly in Brussels. We have long warned about this. Something must change urgently, but we don’t see that change in practice.”

He called for priority to be given — including through international cooperation — to dismantling the gangs that smuggle and distribute weapons, warning that “otherwise that gun violence will continue to escalate here.” Brussels Mayor Philippe Close has demanded extra funding for the federal judicial police in the capital, calling it a “national necessity,” and has pressed Prime Minister Bart De Wever to convene all responsible levels of government.

That appeal points to a structural obstacle: policing is split between federal and local levels, while prevention and post-detention guidance fall to the Communities. As Van Leeuw put it, “Justice can only put out fires, but we must of course also ensure no fire starts.” Whether this week’s tragedy finally forces that coordination remains, for now, an open question.