Bhubaneswar: Police grilled four Russian tourists, including two women, for several hours for clicking photographs of the Jagannath temple in Puri using a drone camera.

They were later released after the cops seized the drone camera and deleted photographs of the shrine's interior complex.

Local residents spotted the four - Maxim Verkhoturov and Dima Zeobin from Divnogorsk, Yulia Shwlcova from Nizhny Novgorod, and Elena Solodehuk from Oktyabrsky - all in their 30s using the aerial camera from the roof of Radha Ballav mutt close to Singhadwar police station.

Later, they were taken to the police station and interrogated for more than four hours.

"We verified their travel documents and released them after issuing a warning. They pled ignorance about restrictions on using drone cameras and aerial vehicles over the shrine," said Singhadwar police station inspector-in-charge Gokul Chandra Das. The district administration in 2014 declared the airspace around the temple as a "no fly zone" after a similar incident.

Das said all of them claimed to be Iskcon devotees and have been in the city since December 7. "They claimed to have come for a parikrama of the shrine and were using the drones to chalk out a route for other devotees who come in future," he added.

A video footage of the temple had become viral on social media in 2014, leading to agitations and demands to declare the airspace around the shrine as a no-fly zone. Devotees came down heavily on temple security after a number of photographs and selfies surfaced on the Internet in the recent past despite a ban on mobile phones inside the temple.

According to Section 30-A (4-C) of the Jagan-nath Temple Act, 1953, devotees cannot take cameras into the shrine. The temple administration have also banned mobiles inside and officials said that violations were .