Guns cheaper than smartphones in Pakistani tribal town

Darra Adamkhel, Pakistan (AFP) : Gunfire echoes through a dusty northwest tribal town, the soundtrack to Pakistan’s biggest arms black market, where Kalashnikovs welded from scrap metal are cheaper than smartphones and sold on an industrial scale.

Darra Adamkhel, a town surrounded by hills some 35 kilometres (20 miles) south of the city of Peshawar, was a hub of criminal activity for decades. People smugglers and drug runners were common and everything from stolen cars to fake university degrees could be procured. This generations-old trade in the illicit boomed in the 1980s: The mujahideen began buying weapons there for Afghanistan’s battle against the Soviets, over the porous border. Later, the town became a stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban, who enforced their strict rules and parallel system of justice -- infamously beheading Polish engineer Piotr Stanczak there in 2009.