Police chased and apprehended a suspect whose garage, it later turned out, had been used to house a small arsenal of weapons and enough hashish to supply a heavy rock concert.
A the 26-year old man was arrested by the GNR after he had fired a gun from his car as he drove through Fereiras, Albufeira. He later threw the weapon from the vehicle.
When the GNR went back to inspect the property in Ferreiras, Albufeira they found a copy of 'Osama Bin Laden - A Estratégia do Terror' by Roland Jaccard, scales, balaclavas, binoculars, a jemmy, one Jihadist graffiti onm an outside wall, three handguns, a rifle, four pistols and more than 600 rounds of ammunition of various suitable calibres.
Even more worrying was the discovery of Galil* with silencer, a specialist weapon used by special forces in many countries.
The GNR report of enough hashish for 10,000 joints may be a slight exaggeration but officers clearly found a sizeable stash.
The case was passed quickly from the GNR to the National Counter-terrorism Unit (UNCT) of the Judicial Police, which will be looking at the man in relation to international terrorist networks.
Portugal authorities know of some of Portuguese passport holders in Syria and other hot spots who have been identified as fighting for the Islamic State.
Neighbours said that the arrested man had talked of a recent trip to Syria. It is more probably that the arrested man is a fantasist drug dealer with previous convictions but the involvement of the Counter-terrorism unit will be standard procedure.
*The Galil is a family of Israeli small arms designed by Yisrael Galil and Yaacov Lior in the late 1960s and produced by Israel Military Industries Ltd (now Israel Weapon Industries Ltd) of Ramat HaSharon.
The rifle design borrowed heavily from the AK-47 and had a modified gas diversion system similar to the AK-47 to reduce the recoil of the rifle making it easier to fire especially in automatic mode.[2] The weapon system consists of a line chambered for the intermediate 5.56×45mm NATO caliber with either the M193 or SS109 ball cartridge and several models designed for use with the 7.62x51mm NATO rifle round. It is named after one of its inventors, Yisrael Galil.
The Galil series of weapons is in use with military and police forces in over 25 countries.
There are four basic configurations of the Galil: the standard rifle-length, a carbine variant known as the SAR , a compact MAR version, and an ARM light machine gun.
