An acid attacker who smuggled a mobile phone into Belmarsh Prison has been handed further time behind bars.

Arthur Collins, 25, said he smuggled the device into the high-security jail in Thamesmead so he could call his pregnant girlfriend, ex-Towie star Ferne McCann.

Appearing at Woolwich Crown Court today (January 17), he was sentenced to a further eight months behind bars for possessing a prohibited item while in prison.

He hid the phone alongside two sim cards and two memory sticks inside a crutch while on remand in September before the trial for his acid attack.

Collins, from Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, admitted hiding the phone in the crutch, which he had been using after hurting his feet trying to evade police while on the run.

He was jailed in December for 20 years for throwing the corrosive substance over the crowd on the dancefloor at the Mangle E8 nightclub in Dalston.

The attack, which happened in April last year, left 16 people with chemical burns and three people temporarily blinded.

Collins' barrister Rebecca Randall said: "The only reason Mr Collins had that phone was to contact, privately, his girlfriend and friends and family.

"His girlfriend at the time was heavily pregnant with his first child.

"That child is now two months old and occasionally visits him with its mother and his sister."

She said Collins feared his recorded prison phone calls to Ms McCann were being leaked to the media, including one in which they discussed baby names.

She said: "He had a conversation with his girlfriend and it appeared in the press a little time later."

Judge Nicholas Heathcote Williams said: "The presence of a mobile phone or component part such as a sim card has many implications, not only for the prison establishment, but also the wider environment.

"It provides a prisoner or prisoners with an opportunity to communicate they would otherwise not have.

"This therefore allows them to act in a way prison is supposed to prevent them from doing."