Family of Bella Culley pay £140k in bid to free pregnant teen held for drug trafficking | EUROtoday

The household of a pregnant British teenager, Bella Culley, has confirmed they paid $187,000 (£140,000) to a Georgian courtroom on Tuesday to safe her launch.

It adopted her arrest on drug smuggling expenses earlier this 12 months.

Nineteen-year-old Ms Culley, from Billingham, northeast England, was apprehended at Tbilisi airport in May upon her arrival within the South Caucasus nation.

Her arrest adopted a interval the place she had been reported lacking in Thailand. Georgian prosecutors allege she was discovered with 12kg of marijuana and 2kg of cannabis in her baggage.

Drug smuggling carries a jail sentence of as much as 20 years in Georgia. Culley has been held at a girls’s jail in Rustavi, a metropolis simply outdoors Tbilisi.

Culley’s mom, Lyanne Kennedy, informed reporters outdoors the Tbilisi courthouse on Tuesday that the household had paid 500,000 lari ($186,846) and have been ready for the funds to be credited to the related authorities account.

Asked in regards to the well being of her daughter Kennedy mentioned: “She’s looking big, pregnant, but she looks strong.”

Culley’s lawyer, Malkhaz Salakaia, mentioned the courtroom would maintain one other listening to on the case subsequent Monday.

Culley initially pleaded not responsible at a listening to in July to possession and trafficking unlawful medicine, and mentioned she had been tortured into transporting them.

She mentioned she was a “clean person” and didn’t do medicine.