Police are on the hunt for a group who broke into a bin full of knives that had just been surrendered.

The suspects were caught on CCTV hauling the weapons collected by police as part of a knife amnesty.

Officers installed the ‘knife surrender bin’ following a 52 per cent spike in knife crime across area over the past year.

The bins have been installed following a 52 per cent spike in knife crime (Picture: Avon and Somerset Police)

But a day later the bin in Weston-super-Mare was broken into and the knives were taken.

PC Jon Biggins said: ‘On the evening of March 13, the knife surrender bin in Weston was broken into by a number of people.

‘The contents were recovered a short distance away, and the whole incident was caught on CCTV.

‘We are in the process of identifying those responsible in order to bring about a prosecution.’

Some of the knives recovered by police over the past few years (Picture: Avon and Somerset Police)

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Avon and Somerset Constabulary introduced the bins in a series of different locations as part of Operation Sceptre – a nation-wide initiative launched in 2016 to tackle knife crime.

More than 1,000 knives are believed to have been collected from the bins in the past few years.