Penitentiary police intercepted an attempt to bring drugs into the Lorusso e Cutugno district prison in Turin during checks of incoming mail at Pavilion C, on via Pianezza.[1] The operation began while officers were inspecting incoming correspondence, and they examined a registered postal item addressed to an Italian detainee.[1]

Inside the parcel they found a box of twelve Giotto coloured pencils whose wooden shafts had been hollowed out to hide several packets of hashish.[1] A drug test confirmed the substance, which weighed about 40 grams gross.[1] ANSA described the pencil seizure as a second attempt to get drugs into the Turin prison, after officers had in recent days found cocaine packed into the cores of marker pens in a parcel addressed to a detainee.[2]

No details were published about who sent the registered letter or who was meant to receive the hashish.[3] Leo Beneduci, general secretary of Osapp, the autonomous penitentiary-police union, said the seizure showed the professionalism of the officers, who were working with a severe shortage of staff and equipment and with overcrowding that was wearing the staff down.[2] Beneduci said that, despite the shortage of staff and equipment and the overcrowding, the officers continued to maintain security, and that the institutions now had to intervene in concrete terms.[2]