Eight prisoners already serving life sentences have received extra jail terms. The sentences relate to a 10-hour riot at HMP Whitemoor in October 2022.
The men, aged between 25 and 33, were serving life for murder or conspiracy to murder. Their new sentences were for violent disorder or ‘participating in a prison mutiny’. They range from one year and four months to four years. Together they add 20 years to the time the men will spend in prison.
The last of the eight received his sentence at Cambridge Crown Court on Friday 20 February.
According to police, the men fashioned weapons out of kettles and broken table legs. They used furniture to build barricades. They also poured oil, shower gel and shampoo onto the floor of a spur. This made the floor too slippery for staff to enter.
The disturbance started at noon on 7 October 2022. A national response team tried to get into the area at around 8pm but did not succeed. The men then withdrew to a cell and built another barricade. At around 10pm the response team regained control, and the men were restrained. The court cases concluded more than three years after the riot.
Detective Constable Emma Purser of Cambridgeshire Police investigated the case. She said the men had “offered extreme violence towards staff”. They had also held the prison’s spur area for about ten hours, she said.
She said the judge had noted, when passing sentence, that only the professionalism of the officers who went onto the wing and faced the violence had prevented serious injury.
Det Con Purser described the scale of the inquiry. She said: “This investigation was a lot of work over the past three years, with hours of CCTV footage to search through and interviews to carry out all over the country”.
