After an attempted gang murder in the French city of Marseille last year, the police found what appeared to be a toy assault rifle, seemingly crafted from plastic and Lego parts.
“But the weapon was lethal,” Col. Hervé Pétry of the national gendarmerie recalled.
In the past three years, this model of homemade semiautomatic firearm, known as an FGC-9, has appeared in the hands of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, rebels in Myanmar and neo-Nazis in Spain. In October, a British teenager will be sentenced for building an FGC-9 in one of the latest terrorism cases to involve the weapon.
