Moment heavily pregnant drug mule Bella Culley walks free from prison in Georgia
Moment heavily pregnant drug mule Bella Culley walks free from prison in Georgia
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Moment heavily pregnant drug mule Bella Culley walks free from prison in Georgia

Isabelle Bates,Jade McElwee 🕒︎ 2025-11-03

Copyright birminghammail

Moment heavily pregnant drug mule Bella Culley walks free from prison in Georgia

Footage shows the moment a British teenager walked out of a prison in Georgia following a drug smuggling charge. Bella Culley, who is thought to be around eight months' pregnant, has been jailed since May this year. The 19-year-old, from Billingham, admitted drug smuggling and reached a plea deal which saw her parents pay a fine of 500,000 Georgian Lari (£138,000) to the court. READ MORE: HMRC deducting £300 from state pensioners' bank accounts from Saturday Get our local newsletters like Black Country News, MySolihull and MySuttonColdfield straight to your inbox On Monday, Bella, who is reportedly due to give birth in December, was shown mercy by prosecutor Vakhtang Tsalugelashvili due to "her age, her condition and her good behaviour, and that she fully cooperated". A court insider added that Georgian authorities decided to show mercy to the teenager given her impending childbirth, TeesideLive reports. In a video, the student nurse can be seen walking down the street, dressed in leggings and a blazer, next to her mother after she was released from Georgia's Women's Prison Number 5 - a Soviet-era detention facility. Following the ruling, to set Bella free from jail, her mother, Lyanne, expressed her relief outside the courtroom. She said: "I am so happy, so happy. I know I don't look like it, but so happy." Bella had already spent nearly six months on remand since her arrest at Tbilisi airport in the Georgian capital on May 10 and had been transferred to a mother and baby unit inside the prison just days ago, reports the Mirror . Her family, including her father Niel Culley, 49, an oil rig technician, paid a fine of 500,000 Georgian Lari (£138,000) as part of a plea deal with Georgian prosecutors . Bella's solicitor had previously suggested that the size of the fine paid would determine the length of her sentence - with the possibility of jail time being annulled, depending on how much money was handed over. It is understood the court originally demanded 800,000 Georgian Lari (£220,000) for her release. Lyanne spoke at the weekend, describing how her daughter had been boiling pasta in a kettle and toasting bread over a candle flame whilst inside . She said: "She now gets two hours out for walking, she can use the communal kitchen, has a shower in her room and a proper toilet. "They all cook for each other. Bella has been making eggy bread and cheese toasties, and salt and pepper chicken." During a previous hearing last week, Mr Salakaia had sought his client's release on bail in advance of today's sentencing. However, Judge Giorgi Gelashvili rejected the application, informing him there were no legal grounds to alter her conditions. At the earlier hearing, Mr Salakaia stated: "She pleaded guilty, fully co-operated with the investigation and the plea bargain has just been reached. So we'd like to ask the judge to release her on bail, given her advanced pregnancy." During the same hearing, Bella was heard querying her solicitor: "Will I be able to take the baby with me if I go back to jail?" He reassured her: "Nobody is going to take the baby away from you". Bella, a student nurse from Billingham , vanished in Pattaya, Thailand, in May before later surfacing in Georgia , which was part of the USSR until 1991. She was apprehended after 11kg of cannabis and over 400g of hashish, a highly potent form of cannabis, were discovered in her luggage. Bella has alleged that she was coerced into trafficking the drugs by gangsters who branded her with an iron, showed her a video of a man being decapitated and threatened to behead her family if she declined to co-operate. At a previous hearing in July, she asserted: "I didn't want to do this. I was forced by torture... All I wanted to do was to travel."

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