Weaponry

Home-made Terrorist Weapons

An important intelligence role is to discover illegal weapons and explosives before they can be used by terrorists or insurgents.
The recovery by Security Forces of smuggled, illegally-held commercial weaponry, like the AK variant assault rifle at the back of the photo, often leads to terrorist groupings developing their own home-made 'improvised' weapons.
The small mortar, fired by a shotgun cartridge, was recovered from Loyalist terrorists during a search in Northern Ireland during the 'Troubles'.
The home-made pistol and 'zip gun' were recovered from Republican terrorist groups, also in Northern Ireland.

Designed by two ex-Shanghai policemen, and named after them, the Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife was issued to many units during the Second World War, most notably the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Commandos.
It is often referred to as 'the commando dagger'.
Experts in the martial arts, learned while on the job in Shanghai, the inventors also put together a booklet detailing many street-fighting techniques that could be used with weapons such as their knife, or indeed when unarmed.
They also gave hand-to-hand combat training lessons.

This German Officer's sword was the property of SS General Theodor Eicke. It was found under a bed in his house near Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.
Eicke was a leading Nazi who led the unit largely responsible for setting up the concentration camp system in the 1930s.
Eicke was later killed on the Russian front when the aircraft he was travelling in was shot down by Russian Anti-Aircraft fire.
The sword and numerous other artefacts were donated to the museum by Dr Hans Hers, a Dutch Intelligence Officer.

Accession number: ASFIC 2239

Manufactured by the French Company 'Unique', this is a small calibre pistol designed for easy concealment.
It is .65 calibre and has an 8-round magazine.