One man has been ar­rest­ed and eight drones seized in con­nec­tion with the smug­gling of con­tra­band in­to the Max­i­mum Se­cu­ri­ty Prison (MSP) at Gold­en Grove Road, Pi­ar­co.

Con­firm­ing this, as he said na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cials were now con­sid­er­ing in­stalling a geo-fence at the MSP fol­low­ing last week’s dis­cov­ery of a loaded pis­tol in a cell, As­sis­tant Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice, Crime, Richard Smith, yes­ter­day said, “We are all aware that drones have been drop­ping stuff or con­tra­band in­to the prison.”

A geo-fence is a vir­tu­al perime­ter or bound­ary around a spe­cif­ic lo­ca­tion, of­ten cre­at­ed us­ing GPS or oth­er lo­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies, which is used to trig­ger ac­tions or alerts when a de­vice or per­son en­ters or ex­its that area.

Smith said there had been 16 drone op­er­a­tions in to­tal at both the MSP and the Port-of-Spain Prison (POSP) thus far.

He said they con­duct­ed 42 search­es at the MSP and the PoSP be­tween June 2024 and the present and an as­sort­ment of con­tra­band was seized, in­clud­ing 330 cell­phones, for which 41 in­mates had been charged.

He said the au­thor­i­ties were con­sid­er­ing dif­fer­ent strate­gies to pre­vent the use of drones to make drops in­to the prison. Asked for an up­date on the dis­cov­ery of the firearm, he said the in­ves­ti­ga­tion was on­go­ing.

—An­na-Lisa Paul