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| Police weapon handover criticised | Police weapon handover criticised |
| (about 2 hours later) | |
| Serious failings in the handling of weapons given to North Wales Police by the public for safe disposal have been highlighted in an internal report. | Serious failings in the handling of weapons given to North Wales Police by the public for safe disposal have been highlighted in an internal report. |
| It said it was impossible to determine how many weapons had been destroyed and that there is no national policy on how the police should handle such weapons. | It said it was impossible to determine how many weapons had been destroyed and that there is no national policy on how the police should handle such weapons. |
| The BBC has seen details of the report which was completed last year. | The BBC has seen details of the report which was completed last year. |
| The force said it regretted poor record keeping and had new procedures for the registration and disposal of weapons. | The force said it regretted poor record keeping and had new procedures for the registration and disposal of weapons. |
| The firearms registry in Prestatyn, Denbighshire, is the place where weapons handed in to police stations across north Wales by the public are sent for safe disposal. | |
| The investigation came about in 2006 when a senior officer found weapons in drawers at the registry. | |
| The investigation by North Wales police was supervised by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. | The investigation by North Wales police was supervised by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. |
| It seems to be a picture of chaos and chaos that was not in any way supervised Wrexham MP Ian Lucas | |
| It discovered a lack of senior management oversight and extremely poor record keeping. | It discovered a lack of senior management oversight and extremely poor record keeping. |
| No inventory was created of weapons received in the force firearms registry so it could not be proved that they had all been destroyed when they were taken to a smelter in Yorkshire to be melted. | |
| The MP for Wrexham, Ian Lucas, said there had been "gross incompetence" and "no management at all" in the firearms registry unit. | |
| He said: "It seems to be a picture of chaos and chaos that was not in any way supervised. | |
| "The result of that is that we had for a number of years disposal of firearms simply not happening in a recorded way, and in a controlled way, and that could have been very, very dangerous indeed." | |
| He has called for the report to be made public. | |
| The force said it was satisfied the weapons handed in were destroyed | |
| Detective superintendent John Clayton, who led the investigation for North Wales Police, told the BBC he thought the force now knows what happened to all the weapons that had come into the firearms registry. | |
| He said: "I'm satisfied that, though we had very poor record-keeping in some respects, I'm satisfied that the weapons were destroyed, although we can't reconcile it." | |
| He added that it had taken "many months and hundreds of man-hours" to achieve that result. | |
| The report pointed out that there were no national guidelines on how police should deal with firearms they receive. | |
| The Home Office is creating an £8m database, the National Ballistics Intelligence Service (NABIS), which aims to provide a registry of all recovered guns and ammunition coming into police possession in England and Wales. | |
| The service will roll-out incrementally from April this year and be fully operational by September. |