Ian Huntley, who murdered two schoolgirls in Soham, has died after an assault at HMP Frankland. His death has sparked public debate about the growing number of homicides in UK prisons.
Huntley, 52, suffered the assault at the high-security prison on 26 February. According to reports, the attack took place in a workshop where he worked. He received intensive care in hospital and died nine days later, on 6 March.
According to police, the suspected attacker, a male prisoner in his 40s, remains “in detention within the prison”.
Huntley, a former school caretaker, received two life sentences in 2003 for murdering two 10-year-old girls in Soham, Cambridgeshire, in 2002. His minimum tariff stood at 40 years.
Homicides rising
Ministry of Justice figures show a rise in killings inside prisons. Safety in Custody Statistics, published in January, recorded seven homicides in prisons in England and Wales in 2025. The total for 2024 stood at six.
That marked a sharp increase on earlier years, when the figures showed between one and three homicides a year.
High-security HMP Wakefield saw the deaths of two notorious prisoners last year: Ian Watkins in October 2025 and Kyle Bevan in November 2025. Both men were serving sentences for sexual offences. Unlike most prisons, Wakefield does not hold men with sexual offence convictions on separate wings.
Violence at Frankland
After Huntley’s death, former BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw highlighted a series of serious violent incidents at Frankland, in County Durham. In May 2024, a prisoner fractured another prisoner’s skull with a claw hammer. That man later pleaded guilty to attempted murder.
Shaw also posted: “Five prisoners died in eight days, December 2025. Investigations underway.”
Ian Acheson, a former prison governor, addressed the case in an article for the Unherd website. “It is not Huntley’s squalid life on which we should be reflecting, but instead the state of supposedly high-security prisons where such extreme violence is becoming worryingly frequent,” he wrote.
Mr Acheson said Frankland held around 800 prisoners, including some of the most dangerous offenders in the country. Terrorists, serial killers and gangsters live among the general population, he wrote. Special units hold the most violent men. He described running a safe regime there as an extraordinarily complex task.
He also pointed to several attacks on uniformed officers by high-risk prisoners in recent years. “Safety lapses that enabled these incidents, including the attack on Huntley, also put people in uniform who look after prisoners on our behalf at lethal risk,” he wrote.
The Prison News directory lists Frankland as a high-security prison for men in the North East. Its last full inspection before these events took place in July 2024. Inspectors rated safety, respect, purposeful activity and preparation for release as reasonably good.
