GANGS GET FERRY TO CALAIS TO BUY GUNS

IT WAS as easy as stocking up on cheap booze and fags. In a shop in the centre of Calais I was holding a Colt revolver.

"This is a real handgun," said owner Jean Pierre Fusil. "This can shoot a man at 70 metres. "It makes a very big bang and it goes fast. Many, many British people buy these."

I wasn't alone in Fusil's shop. Before I bought the .44 calibre revolver for around EUR250, three members of a Yardie gang had been secretly discussing selling handguns among themselves while stocking up on a box of 24 pepper-spray canisters.

Calais, once the destination for bootleggers from all over, is now being targeted again - by gangs of criminals using booze-cruises to tool up with cheap handguns and smuggle them back to Britain.

Laughingly, they call them "tools cruises".

On the same street as Fusil's shop, Guy Ducrocq sold us a 12-bore "sawn-off" shotgun pistol at his gun shop for EUR185.

The double-barrelled GC-54 model, made by the French company SAPL, is legal in France if fired with reduced-impact cartridges. But the steady stream of British criminals who buy them simply use standard shotgun cartridges which are the same size.

Ducrocq said: "Even then, at close range it will blow a big hole in the body."

Slicing his hand across his abdomen, he said: "It'll cut you in half."

Ducrocq said: "I sell many guns to tourists." He showed us his sales log with pages and pages of addresses.

He added: "They buy a lot of weapons. As well as guns, I sell 30 cases of CS gas to the English every week.

A Yardie from London added: "We only get the Seacat because you never get searched on it."

This week it was revealed that record caches of hand grenades, machine guns and Semtex have been seized at ports.

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