Weapons smuggling

Security threat from drones over prisons

Around 220 drones were counted over Manchester prison alone last year.(Bild: LPD NÖ)

Organized crime gangs in the UK are using drones to supply inmates in high-security prisons with drugs and weapons. This is "a threat to national security", the British government's chief inspector of prisons, Charles Taylor, expressed his alarm on Tuesday. 

He had previously made unannounced visits to prisons in Manchester in the north-west and Long Lartin in the west of England and found "thriving" drug markets. In Manchester prison, the quantity of drugs had reached a "catastrophic level", Taylor subsequently explained in a report.

According to the report, criminal gangs bring the drugs to the prisoners using drones, which they fly over the prisons. They use holes burned in the windows by prisoners.

Defense of airspace abandoned
Weapons such as so-called zombie knives - long blades with serrated edges - are also smuggled into the prisons in the same way, Taylor told the BBC. "It's quite possible that someone determined enough could get a firearm in," he added.

Police and prison officers have given up defending the airspace above prisons, according to Taylor. Some 220 drones have been spotted at Manchester prison in the past year, by far the highest number of any prison in England and Wales.

The Labour government, which has been in office since July last year, emphasized the urgency of the situation and promised countermeasures. At the same time, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice lamented the conditions in which the prisons were at the time of the change of government. They were "overcrowded and full of drugs and violence".