The semi-automatic AK-74 Krinkov assault rifle – an upgrade to the venerable AK-47 – is the market’s bestseller, however, priced at just 10,000 Pakistani rupees ($72). You can pick up a local copy of an M16 rifle, standard issue to US troops stationed in neighbouring Afghanistan, for as little as 30,000 Pakistani rupees ($214), or about a quarter of the cost of the original, at Khan’s shop. “We’ve been doing this since the British were ruling here – my father, and his father before him,” says Banat Khan, 67, the owner of a gun shop. The air is thick with the smell of gunpowder and machined metal, as gunsmiths work industriously at a trade that has employed generations of craftsmen here in the Khyber tribal district. In the two-kilometre stretch of the Darra Adam Khel market, about 140km west of the capital Islamabad, there are dozens of weapons factories, manufacturing everything from crude copies of Chinese pistols to sophisticated facsimiles of the US-made M16 automatic rifle or the Austrian Glock semiautomatic pistol. Darra Adam Khel, Pakistan – Nestled in the eastern foothills of the Safed Koh mountains in northwestern Pakistan, a jumble of low buildings forms a bazaar that has been the centre of guns and drugs in this part of the world for more than a century.
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