French police have arrested twelve men and seized close to 150 firearms in a coordinated operation against Daltonlar, a Turkish organized crime network that investigators say has been running an international counterfeit weapons trafficking route stretching from Marseille to Paris and across several European countries.
The operation culminated over the weekend of September 10-11, 2026, when a police unit intercepted a van on the autoroute running through the Ain department, in eastern France. Inside, officers from the Brigade de Recherche et d’Intervention (BRI) found close to 150 handguns packed into six sports bags — a discovery that triggered a wave of coordinated arrests across multiple French departments over the following two days. By the time the operation concluded, twelve men, the majority of them Turkish nationals, had been taken into custody.
Among those arrested was Hasan S., known by the alias “Haso,” a French national of Turkish descent whom investigators describe as the central and essential figure behind counterfeit weapons trafficking in the Marseille area. He was apprehended at the Arles toll plaza in the Bouches-du-Rhône department as the wider operation unfolded. Hasan S. was no stranger to police attention: he had previously been placed under judicial examination in Marseille in July 2025 on separate weapons charges, and investigators had already identified him as a person of interest tied to the Daltonlar network well before the September operation. During his latest period in custody, he exercised his right to remain silent and declined to answer investigators’ questions.
The case against the network dates back further than the September raids. French investigators, working within the Parquet National Anticriminalité Organisée (PNACO) — the national prosecutor’s office created specifically to handle organized crime cases — opened a preliminary investigation in June 2025 after receiving intelligence from German authorities pointing to the group’s cross-border weapons trafficking activity. That inquiry led investigators to install vehicle surveillance on suspected network members and, by July 2026, to uncover what they believed was a plot involving violent action connected to an imprisoned member of the Turkish community, further raising the priority of the case.
Daltonlar — a name investigators say the group took from the comic-strip Dalton brothers, the bumbling outlaw gang of the Lucky Luke Western series — has been mapped by French and German authorities as operating not only in France but also in Germany, Belgium, Spain and Italy. Beyond arms trafficking, the organization is suspected of involvement in drug trafficking, cigarette smuggling, extortion, and, according to investigators, more serious violent acts including assassinations carried out on behalf of, or within, the group’s criminal rivalries.
All twelve suspects arrested in the operation were presented to an investigating judge at the Paris tribunal on Monday, September 14, 2026. During questioning, the men uniformly denied any affiliation with a criminal organization, disputing prosecutors’ characterization of Daltonlar as a structured gang rather than a loose network of individuals. The case was formally opened before Paris judicial authorities given PNACO’s jurisdiction over organized crime matters nationwide, reflecting the scale and cross-regional nature of the trafficking network uncovered.
The investigation drew on cooperation between French police units — including the BRI, PNACO and the Office Central de Lutte contre le Crime Organisé (OCLCO) — and multiple zonal police directorates (DZPN) covering the different regions where suspects and evidence were located, as well as ongoing intelligence-sharing with German law enforcement, whose original tip in 2025 helped set the investigation in motion. The scale of coordination reflects the increasingly cross-border character of the arms trafficking networks French authorities are confronting, in which weapons manufactured or smuggled through one country are distributed through criminal cells spread across several others.
The seizure of roughly 150 firearms in a single interception ranks among the larger weapons hauls French police have reported in 2026, and investigators have said the discovery underscores concerns about the volume of counterfeit and illegally modified firearms now circulating through organized crime channels into France’s domestic black market. Authorities have not yet disclosed the intended destination or buyers for the seized weapons, though the group’s documented reach into both the Paris region and Marseille — two of France’s largest urban centers and, in Marseille’s case, a longstanding hotspot for gang and drug-related armed violence — has raised concern about the potential downstream use of such a large cache of firearms had it not been intercepted.
The investigation into Daltonlar’s broader structure, financing and international connections is continuing, with French investigators expected to pursue further arrests and to deepen cooperation with counterparts in Germany, Belgium, Spain and Italy as they work to map the full extent of the network’s cross-border operations.
