It was just last year July when Simons Town’s naval base was robbed, six storerooms in the base broken into and depleted.

Missing from the rooms were 77 hand grenades, explosives, Uzi sub-machine guns, R-1 rifles, pistols and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

But that’s nothing compared to what was stolen out of a military installation in Portugal on June 28, reports The Daily Beast:

150 live hand grenades, 44 rocket propelled grenades, 1,450 9mm cartridges, 18 tear gas grenades, scores of triggers and detonators of various kinds, 102 explosive charges, and 264 blocks of plastic explosive.

And it’s all still missing.

But the chaos didn’t stop there. Two days after that robbery, a van loaded with nitroglycerin (an explosive liquid) was robbed in Barcelona, Spain:

[D]ozens of containers of nitroglycerin were taken from a Toyota Proace belonging to the company Fike Solutions—which carries out controlled explosions—and the robbery occurred in the company’s parking lot.

Although the police later found the van abandoned without the explosives, there is no official information about the robbery.

What is going on in the EU?

While the stash stolen from our locale was assumed to be for gang wars in the Cape Flats, European authorities are worried that the military-grade munitions taken from Portugal, and the nitroglycerin taken from Spain, are linked to terrorism.

Although Portugal did not raise the anti-terror alert (their hypothesis is that the robbery actually is linked to jihad), police sources in Spain believe that a criminal non-terrorist organisation was behind the theft.

It’s safe to assume that such criminal organisations could sell the weapons to the terrorists, though, and the rest of the EU is not happy:

The controversy in Portugal has caused a political tsunami, because the theft has brought to light the lamentable security measures of the Tancos base: The video surveillance system was damaged five years ago and had not been repaired, the motion sensors do not work, the wire fencing is vulnerable to a good pair of scissors, and the 25 watchtowers are in such bad shape soldiers don’t dare to climb them.

The thieves may have gotten their inspiration from the official government bulletin itself, Diário da República, which on June 19 called for a €316,000 tender to repair the north, east, and south of the fence of the military base of Tancos.

Tsk, tsk, Portugal.

Then, on the other side in Barcelona:

Spanish interior ministry sources say that the jihadis detained recently in Malaga, in southern Spain, planned to buy weapons and bulletproof vests in the country.

And all this is happening while Spain is the midst of a continuous anti-jihadi operation where police forces “announce the arrests of terrorists, although most of them are being picked up for proselytising, not acting”.

Although there are yet to be any attacks in either country, they appear to be in a similar ISIS-linked situation South Africa; there is some activity, but nothing dangerous.

Yet.

At the end of the day, jihadis are clearly active in the greater Europe – and now there are explosives in that mix, too.

Let’s just hope they get stashed somewhere underground, only to be found by future generations in millennia to come.

[source:thedailybeast]