Police seize pistol and drone bound for Nis prison
Officers in Nis stopped a taxi and found a pistol loaded with eight rounds and a drone with a remote control. The weapon was allegedly meant to be flown into Nis prison.
The police department in Nis has arrested D. R., born in 1977, a local man suspected of planning to fly a pistol over the wall of a prison. The arrest was ordered by the Nis Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office. Officers pulled over the taxi he was riding in and found both the gun and the aircraft that was supposed to carry it.
The target, according to police, was Nis Correctional Facility. The taxi was stopped the evening before the case was made public, and Serbia’s Interior Ministry, known as MUP, released the details on August 1, 2026.
What officers found in the taxi
Two items were recovered, and neither means much without the other. The pistol held eight rounds in the magazine, so it was loaded. Next to it sat a drone and its remote control, the delivery method for getting the weapon inside the prison grounds.
The ministry statement puts it this way:
The suspicion is that D. R. intended to use a drone to bring a pistol into Nis Correctional Facility, and the police, through effective operational work, prevented him from doing so.
The drone never left the ground. Gun and aircraft were still together in the same car, which places the arrest at the transport stage, before the suspect reached whatever spot he had picked for the launch.
Why the taxi was stopped at that moment
This was not a routine traffic check. The statement says plainly that officers moved in after gathering operational intelligence, meaning they knew what they were looking for before the taxi pulled away.
A stop like this gets built in advance. Information is collected first, then a moment is chosen when the evidence is on the suspect rather than in a flat or a storage unit somewhere.
What the statement leaves out
Police did not say who inside the prison the pistol was meant for, or whether any staff or inmate had a hand in the plan. There is nothing on the intended launch point and nothing on further arrests in the same operation.
Those answers belong to the prosecution’s investigation. Until then, the official account is what stands: a man, a taxi, a loaded pistol and a drone.
What happens next
The suspect has been ordered held for up to 48 hours. He will then be brought before the higher public prosecutor in Nis together with a criminal complaint, and that office decides where the case goes.
He is charged with the illegal manufacture, possession, carrying and trafficking of weapons and explosive materials. He is presumed innocent until a final court ruling, and everything in the ministry statement remains an allegation by police and prosecutors rather than an established fact.
