PHOTO SHOOT: Fabrizio has his picture taken at the refugee Centre in Leeds for the Control Arms exhibition being staged at the Royal Armouries PICTURE: TONY JOHNSON

By Howard Williamson

Leeds, UK, April 27, 2006 – FABRIZIO Macor was driving to the shanty town school where he was a teacher when a gang of gunmen pulled up his car at a roadblock.

"They knocked on my window with a gun and said we were going for a ride," he said.

"In Venezuela that means they will either steal your car, kill you or take you to a cash machine to draw out money.

"I was terrified but I tried to speak politely to them and show them I was not afraid but would not fight them."

Then Fabrizio had a stroke of luck. A child of six who came along the road was related to one of the gang.

"He's one of my teachers," he called out.

The gang let Fabrizio go.

He recalled the incident when he signed up in Leeds for a campaign to end the trade in illegal arms.

Oxfam and Amnesty International are backing the campaign which is collecting one million faces of people around the world who support the movement. So far more than 950,000 photographs and drawings have been collected.

Fabrizio posed for his campaign portrait along with Somali refugee Hussain Mohammad. Both are workers for the Refugee Council in Leeds.

"There are two ways of getting guns in Venezuela," said Fabrizio, 43, married with two children. "The police are corrupt and sell them on to people and criminals steal guns legally held by other people."

Hussain, now 22, fled his homeland, Somalia, with his two sisters and younger brother to escape the civil war which claimed the lives of his parents.

He said: "In Somalia, everyone has experience of a member of their family being killed by the gun.

"I feel safe over here in Britain but would love to go back home one day."

Richard Byrne, spokesman for the Refugee Council, said: "One of the major reasons people flee to the UK is to escape violence in their homelands. State repression, armed militias and death squads are all fuelled by the uncontrolled trade in small arms."

Ben Margolis, a spokesman for Oxfam, said: "This is a critical year in our quest to halt the flood of guns. In June, the United Nations meet in New York for their first major conference on small arms for five years.

"We hope they will agree on an International Arms Trade Treaty that will outlaw the sales of small arms that could be used in violent crime."

Source: Leads Today

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