WARSAW, March 12 (Reuters) – Police in western Poland were investigating on Thursday the origin of a drone discovered by a worker at a lignite mine and it did not appear to be a civilian model, a police spokesperson said.
NATO member Poland has been on high alert for airspace incursions since more than 20 Russian drones entered its airspace on the night of September 9-10, 2025, and some of them were found in the east of the country.
“It doesn’t look like a civilian drone, but there’s no information about the model,” police spokesperson Maciej Swiecichowski told Reuters by phone from the western city of Poznan.
State broadcaster TVP Info cited sources as saying it was a Gerbera military drone. Gerbera drones are produced in Russia and are used as decoys.
Local police said on X earlier they had been alerted to an “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle of the drone type” found by an employee in Galczyce, Konin County, on the premises of the lignite mine.
Lignite, also known as ‘brown coal’, is a combustible sedimentary rock.
“At the scene, police officers from Konin and Poznan are securing the area,” they said, adding that nobody had been injured in the incident.
(Reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, Alan Charlish, Pawel Florkiewicz, Anna Koper, editing by Andrei Khalip and Gareth Jones)
