Thefts of weapons from military depots and arms-production plants increased sharply last year, leading to a fivefold rise in crimes involving firearms in Russia, Interior Ministry officials said Tuesday.


Most of the weapons end up falling into the hands of organized crime gangs, the officials said.


"I want to stress that gangs obtain most of their weapons (from military facilities run by) the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation," Gennady Gorbunov, a police officer for the ministry's anti-organized crime department, told a press conference.


According to the ministry's statistics, 16,540 firearms were stolen from depots in 1993, compared with 275 in 1989. As a result, the number of crimes involving firearms increased fivefold over the last three years to 22,500 cases in 1993.


The military has repeatedly denied that weapons have disappeared from its depots or that officers and soldiers are selling their weapons on the black market, despite frequent accusations.


Colonel General Matvei Burlakov, the former chief of staff of the Western Group of the Russian Army, withdrawn this year from Germany, has said only 62 handguns disappeared from the group since 1946. Police said they confiscated 54,000 firearms over the first nine months of this year, compared with 53,000 over the whole 1993. They said they are currently hunting for 20,000 firearms listed as missing.


Gorbunov said the collapse of the Soviet Union had led to the weakening of control over military depots on Russian territory and in the former Soviet republics, which have started to create their own armed forces.


Gorbunov said it was possible to find practically any kind of weapon on the black market, ranging from ordinary army pistols to armed vehicles.


"We have information about servicemen from different military units around Russia being involved in the illegal arms trade," he said. "Actually, it happens (throughout) the country."


Vladimir Miskin, an officer for the ministry's crime investigation department, said an organized crime group involved in the killing in March of Razil Musin, the deputy chairman of the Bashkir Supreme Soviet, possessed not only pistols but 36 armed air-to-surface missiles.


"A group of army officers was part of this gang and were involved in theft of weapons from the Military Aviation Academy in Ufa," Miskin said.


Musin was killed in a powerful explosion at his house in Dyurtyuli, a suburb of Ufa about 1,200 kilometers east of Moscow.Miskin said police investigating the case had detained 16 military officers and had also confiscated 269 grenades and 20 explosive devices.


Miskin said employees of the main firearms-production plants in Tula, Izhevsk, Kovrov and Chelyabinsk were involved in mass thefts of weapons spare parts .


He said the plants had inadequate security systems.


According to police statistics, 12,000 people were prosecuted the first nine months of this year for illegal possession of arms, but only 18 percent of them were convicted.


Miskin said police had broken up 14 crime groups involved in illegal arms trade which operated in the Tulsky firearms-production plant over the last several years.


Alexander Shanshurov, an officer for the ministry's public order department, said only 661 shops and enterprises in Russia had licenses to buy and sell weapons.


According to police statistics, 3.2 million people in Russia possess different kinds of hunting weapons, and another 500,000 have gas guns.