An 18 year old local female was arrested by uniformed officers of the Area Response Teams on the morning of Saturday 27th January 2018, following numerous nuisance calls to the 199 emergency telephone number.

The female has been granted bail.

The Royal Gibraltar Police takes a serious view of this type of behaviour. Nuisance/prank calls to the emergency number cause an unnecessary additional burden on our control room operators, who operate in a very high workload, highly stressful environment. They also give rise to our resources being deployed to non-existent emergencies, potentially diverting these from where they are truly needed. Additionally, nuisance/prank callers also block the emergency lines resulting in genuine callers with real emergencies not being able to contact our operators with the resultant delay in response.

Only last week local marine assets initiated a search and rescue operation at sea after a prank call was received at the RGP control room, purportedly from a small vessel taking water with 7 persons onboard.