Ankara
\nBelgium\u2019s prime minister was a little surprised on landing back home from Wednesday\u2019s Nato summit in Turkiye to find that he had a handgun and ammunition in his luggage.
\nAfter Nato leaders gathered for Wednesday\u2019s fractious summit in Ankara, their host, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, handed each an unusual parting gift: a vintage revolver, along with live ammunition indicating it was not just for show.
\nErdogan wanted to showcase Turkiye\u2019s defence industry, which has become a key export and foreign policy tool.
\nImages shared by the office of Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda showed what appeared to be the Gumusay 357 Magnum, a rare six-shooter produced by Turkish arms maker MKE in the 1990s.
\nIt was set in a wooden display box featuring Turkiye\u2019s flag and the Nato logo as well as a placard inscribed \u201cGumusay, the first revolver-type handgun produced in our country\u201d in Turkish and English.
\nEngraved Turkish revolvers make unusual gifts
\nSpanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez\u2019s spokesperson said all the leaders had been given the same model, engraved with their own names.
\nThe Belgian premier, Bart De Wever, handed his to Brussels\u2019 airport police to be secured in a safe.
\nAn aide to Polish President Karol Nawrocki told Radio RMF FM that his revolver was awaiting customs clearance at Warsaw Airport and would be kept in an appropriate place \u201cso that it is firstly safe and secondly respected as a gift\u201d.
\n\u201cCertainly no one will be shooting it,\u201d he added.
\nThe offices of the Dutch and Swedish prime ministers said their revolvers had been take to their respective embassies in Ankara.
\nThe Dutch one was due to be disabled while the Swedish one was awaiting import paperwork.
\nThe gun given to Britain\u2019s Keir Starmer came with a cleaning kit and 500 bullets, a Downing Street source said.
\nItalian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni\u2019s revolver was already stored at the seat of government, the Palazzo Chigi, along with other state gifts.
\nEU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was intending to donate hers to a military museum, while the leader of Greece planned to give his to the War Museum in Athens.
\nTurkiye\u2019s modern handgun industry focuses mainly on semi-automatics, making the Gumusay something of a collector\u2019s curiosity.
\nTurkish gunmakers have muscled into Europe\u2019s civilian firearms market with inexpensive pistols and shotguns, challenging older Italian and Belgian names long associated with higher-priced sporting and service weapons.
\nAccording to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, Turkiye was the world\u2019s third-largest exporter of small arms between 2019 and 2024, with exports totalling about $3 billion over the period, behind the United States and Italy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ankara Belgium\u2019s prime minister was a little surprised on landing back home from Wednesday\u2019s Nato summit in Turkiye to find that he had a handgun and ammunition in his luggage. After Nato leaders gathered for Wednesday\u2019s fractious summit in Ankara, their host, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, handed each an unusual parting gift: a vintage …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":95360,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100093,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100082\/revisions\/100093"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}