THE father of one of the Dunblane massacre victims yesterday joined forces in London with leading charities and religious organisations in demanding that the leaders of the most powerful nations in the world this weekend give a lead to control the trade in small arms.

The final communique of the world's leaders at the G8 summit in Birmingham, beginning tomorrow, is likely to condemn illicit small arms trafficking and will highlight the trade's involvement in crime and drugs.

While Mr Mick North and others yesterday conceded this would be a welcome first step, they said that it would not go far enough.

As the recent shipment of arms to Sierra Leone illustrated, loopholes existed in current arms controls which allowed guns to be exported to countries under United Nations embargo. The grey areas in brokering, licensed production, and international procurement deals had to be made transparent, they declared.

Oxfam, Christian Aid, International Alert, and the British American Security Information Council declared at a joint news conference that the G8 nations had the capacity to fund programmes to tackle the problems of light weapons proliferation.

Mr North said: ''Sophie, my daughter, was one of those five and six-year-old infants killed in the gymnasium of Dunblane Primary School.''

He now felt it was his duty to campaign for the rights of the vast majority of the world's population who wished to live their lives free from the fear of the bullet.