In a warehouse in the United States, Aaron, Kay and Matt enthusiastically open crates and pull out their contents – guns, some bearing personal engravings or fitted with custom-made grips.
There is black Cyrillic writing on one of the crates and some of the guns are marked with paper tags; engravings indicate the calibre, producer and year they were made, in this case M83 revolvers produced more than 30 years ago by the Zastava arms factory in central Serbia.
“What we have here is a crate of surplus revolvers, the M83 Zastava revolver,” Aaron says in a video shared in October 2024 with 1.6 million subscribers to the trio’s YouTube channel, Classic Firearms.
“We just wanted to give you all a look inside the crate, see what you can kind a expect as far as condition of these,” Aaron adds.
Classic Firearms sells guns, in this case Serbian-made guns that this investigation shows were once in civilian ownership but were likely surrendered to Serbian police during repeated arms amnesties and legalisation campaigns over the past several decades.
The video of Aaron, Kay and Matt is just one of dozens analysed by BIRN over the last 12 months and offering old Zastava M83 revolvers for sale at prices ranging from $250 to $750.
Some guns are marked with paper tags bearing the acronym of the Serbian interior ministry, ‘MUP’, and attached by wire, which is traditionally how Serbian police mark weapons; other tags clearly show the names of previous owners and the case numbers under which they were registered, while some of the grips bear the crest of Belgrade’s Red Star football club or the double-headed eagle from the Serbian coat of arms – modifications that three former and current police officers said would be prohibited if they were official police-issue weapons.
Red Star Belgrade FC’s name and coat of arms engraved on one of the Zastava revolvers. Source: YouTube/Classic Firearms.
A Serbian two-headed eagle carved on the handle of a gun. Source: YouTube/Classic Firearms.
One leading international organisation working in the field of small arms – and which agreed to comment only on condition that it not be identified – questioned the legality, telling BIRN: “What we can say is that it would not make sense for weapons to be marked in this way if they were sold legally.”
Serbian law does not regulate the sale of surrendered or seized weapons, an omission that experts say is ripe for exploitation; responding to a Freedom of Information request seeking information on whether police have been selling surplus, surrendered or confiscated weapons, the Serbian interior ministry said “such information is not contained in any document in the [ministry’s] possession”.
The police itself did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did Zastava, the manufacturer in the town of Kragujevac, or Classic Firearms. Zastava Arms USA, the exclusive importer of Zastava products to the US, said it was “not involved in any way” in the guns’ import.
Awash with weapons
Serbia has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world, generally attributed to the wars of the 1990s and the collapse of federal Yugoslavia.
Before the most recent campaign for gunowners to hand over their weapons, in 2023, there were an estimated 39 privately-owned firearms per every 100 people in Serbia.
The 2023 campaign followed two mass shootings in two days that May: the killing of nine children and a security guard at a Belgrade school by a then 13-year-old boy, followed by the killing of nine people and wounding of 12 when a man went on a gun rampage in two villages southeast of the capital.
At the time, Serbian officials said the campaign cut the number of legally owned firearms in the country to roughly 570,000, from some 766,000 before.
The interior ministry told BIRN that the collected weapons were stored in police warehouses.
According to arms export data provided by the Serbian trade ministry, in the past three years just one Zastava M83 was exported from Serbia to the US.
“Weapons, ammunition for destruction, Kruševac [Serbian city]” written in Serbian. Source: YouTube/Classic Firearms.
A paper tag with the name in Serbian Cyrillic and the acronym of the Serbian Interior Ministry, MUP. Source: YouTube/Classic Firearms.
The videos reviewed by BIRN, with the help of arms experts and former and current police officers, were uploaded in October 2024 and the spring of 2025, though it remains unclear when the weapons entered the US or from where.
The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, ATF, which is in charge of licencing and controlling the import of arms into the US, did not respond to a request for comment.
The videos analysed by BIRN contain indicators of who imported the weapons; a video on the YouTube channel Casual Collector, for example, shows packaging specifying the name of the importer as ‘EPS Imports’ – full name Exotic Parts Supply Imports – and which has a valid licence from the ATF; one of the guns displayed in the October 2024 Classic Firearms video is engraved with the name ‘PW ARMS INC’, a Washington-based firm which has a practice of engraving weapons it imports. BIRN also identified the firms ‘Aim Surplus’ and ‘Atlantic Firearms’ as sellers. None of the importers or sellers responded to requests for comment.
One of the guns displayed in the October 2024 ‘Classic Firearms’ video is engraved with the name ‘PW ARMS INC’, a Washington-based firm which has a practice of engraving weapons it imports. Source: YouTube/Classic Firearms.
Sale unregulated
Serbia’s Law on Arms Exports does not explicitly prohibit the interior ministry from selling surplus or seized weapons.
According to the Law on Weapons and Ammunition, weapons that have become the property of the state may be appropriated, destroyed, or used for the needs of state bodies.
Neither law, however, specifies how such weapons may be ‘appropriated’ and there are no bylaws nor publicly available police guidance regulating the sale of weapons in police possession.
Milan Dumanovic, who retired from the police in May this year, said the ministry resolved the dilemma internally, with a ‘communique’ stating that, a year after a weapon is seized or surrendered, it may be sold at auction to any private or state company licenced to trade in weapons, providing the weapon is not unusable or marked for destruction.
“Within MUP, everything is resolved through communiques,” Dumanovic told BIRN. “Police officers now joke that the communique is the main legal act, not the Constitution or the Police Act. Communiques arrive daily and are followed, even if they are not in line with the law.”
Dusan Stankovic, an associate of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy and a former police officer, said the issue needs regulating.
“It is possible that the sale is undefined in order to exclude the possibility of manipulation,” he told BIRN. “But it is also possible that it was intentionally left unregulated to enable such actions. It seems that in the current situation it is necessary to regulate the sale in order to prevent cases like this.”
A paper tag with a name in Serbian Cyrillic. Source: YouTube/Classic Firearms.
Stolen or sold as scrap metal
There is no publicly available data on the sale of arms at police auction.
The only instance that became public was in 2020, when the Serbian weekly magazine NIN reported that the interior ministry had sold weapons from police stocks to a private company called GIM, represented at the time, according to official documents, by Branko Stefanovic. Stefanovic, who has since died, was the father of Nebojsa Stefanovic, the interior minister at the time of the sale. The ministry did not respond to the report.
However, the owner of a Serbian gun shop, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the police also sell arms as “scrap metal” – a weapon is written off as defective but, instead of being destroyed, it is sold to a private dealer.
“We’re aware that this is how it’s done,” the gun shop owner said. “And then, in the official paperwork, they state that it was sold as scrap metal and the difference in profit is shared.”
Police depots have also been hit by a number of major thefts in recent years.
At the end of 2023, a police officer was charged with involvement in the theft of 272 pistols from a police station in the southern Serbian city of Nis. The pistols had been surrendered during the campaign launched after the two mass shootings in May of that year; to date, only three of the 272 have been recovered.
Then in September this year, 512 surrendered weapons went missing from police premises in the town of Doljevac, some 15 kilometres south of Nis; four senior police officers in the area were suspended and two men were arrested.