Recently released images show Belgian Federal Police personnel, armed with Israeli Uzi submachine guns, guarding NATO’s main operational headquarters in Brussels.
Once a favorite weapon of the American Secret Service, Uzi has been replaced with advanced guns, not only in the US but also in many other countries across the world over the years.
The Uzi is a family of Israeli open-bolt, blowback-operated submachine guns. The gun has been named after Uziel Gal, an Israeli Army officer who designed and developed the gun after the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.
Gal developed the Uzi gun on the basis of earlier Czech designs, in which bullets were fed into the gun’s chamber from a box-shaped magazine that had been inserted into the pistol grip.
The features were used to design the Uzi gun which was easy to load, very compact, reasonably stable, and accurate in firing automatically. Moreover, the gun was extremely well-tooled and durable.
While the gun was a textbook example of a well-designed, reliable, and simple submachine gun made of stamped parts, it is no longer in use in most countries. However, Belgian Federal Police are still using the weapon-type, as the photos have shown.
As per reports, the pictures were released by the United States military, which also used the iconic gun. Belgian Federal Police personnel were seen training with their Uzi submachine guns at an indoor range at the Training Support Center at Chièvres Air Base.
Chièvres is located around 12 miles from NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), which is the home of the Alliance’s Allied Command Operations (ACO), in Mons city of Belgium.
In the images, the officers could also be seen training with other guns such as the Smith & Wesson M&P9 pistols.
In 2011, the American gun manufacturers had won the contract of supplying the 9mm handguns to the Belgian Federal Police.
While the original standard Uzi guns have a barrel just over 10 inches long and an overall length of just over 25-and-a-half inches, the current Uzi guns used by the Belgian security personnel are slightly shorter due to the absence of fixed wood stock.
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