The weapons seen in various images of the attackers include a variant of the famous AK47; a Czech-made sub-machine gun called a Scorpion; several Russian-designed Tokarev TT pistols and a grenade or rocket launcher — probably the Yugoslav M80 Zolja.

“One of the reasons we see a lot of Kalashnikovs and AK-47s on the black market is because Russia has just upgraded the Kalashnikov, and that has created massive stockpiles of the older models,” said Kathie Lynn Austin, an expert on arms trafficking and the director of the Conflict Awareness Project, an international nongovernmental organization dedicated to investigating major arms traffickers.