A Russian villager got rather more than he bargained for when he bought a number of old crates from a passing truck to use as firewood. The BBC reports:
A man who had bought crates off the back of a lorry in Russia for firewood found they contained 79 Kalashnikov rifles and parts, Russian media report.
The villager in Udmurtia reported the rifles to a local policeman, after which investigators examined the 64 crates.
It was established that the army-issue rifles had been delivered for scrap to the nearby Izhmash arms plant.
The driver had sold off the crates, thinking they were all empty.
However, seven of them were found to contain rifles, as well as 253 magazines and other parts, a police source told Interfax news agency.
. . .
... an investigation has begun into whether the rifles were "thrown out accidentally or there was an organised channel for selling them off illegally", Udmurtia prosecutors' assistant Olesya Fedchishina told Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
"The crates in which the weapons were found were removed from a high-security installation so even the rifles could not have got there accidentally," she added.
There's more at the link.
79 rifles and 253 magazines??? That's enough weapons to equip a couple of platoons! If those magazines had been loaded (Kalashnikov magazines normally hold 30-40 rounds each, depending on caliber), that would represent well over 7,000 cartridges. If the purchaser had chucked their boxes onto the flames, it would have given a whole new meaning to the term "firepower"!
Peter
3 comments:
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I would've kept them :D.
I dare say, had he kept them, he could have recovered any money spent for firewood by selling them later. Of course, he (likely) would have ended up in the hoosegow too.
For clarity, the standard packaging for Kalashnikovs is 10 rifles crate along with 4-6 magazines and accessories for each rifle.
Ammo is never packed in the crates.
If they are Category 4, which is non-serviceable, they would be sold for scrap.
The crates would make good firewood in a pinch, but is not very dense wood, and tends to be oil-soaked from repeated conserving of the rifles.
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