Officials unclear on extent of gun smuggling

Updated Thu. Jul. 3 2008 4:21 PM ET The Canadian Press VANCOUVER -- It was almost 5 a.m. when a suburban Vancouver police officer nearing the end of his shift watched a car's uncertain journey down a street a few kilometres north of the Canada-U.S. border. "He wasn't certain that perhaps we've got an impaired driver, somebody who is lost...," Const. Sharlene Brooks, spokeswoman for police in Delta, says of the routine traffic stop last Sept. 27. Instead, a search of the vehicle, triggered by the occupants' suspicious behaviour, turned up several gym bags filled with handguns and an automatic machine pistol. Curtis Coleman had been caught red-handed smuggling a shipment of guns into Canada from the U.S. Again. With more than three dozen gang-related killings in the Vancouver area in the last year and 11 murders in Toronto in... [read full story]