A British teenager who had been missing for four days in Thailand has been arrested 4,000 miles away… in Georgia.
Bella May Culley, 18, from Billingham, County Durham, sparked a massive international search operation this week as she hadn’t been in touch with her family since Saturday, and was not answering her phone.
Her dad, Neil Culley and sister Kerrie Culley, flew out to Thailand in search of her, and found that she had last been seen in Pattaya, about 70 miles southeast of Bangkok.
It’s now been revealed that the 18-year-old was caught carrying 14kg of cannabis into Georgia after she was flagged during a scanner check at Tbilisi International Airport.
Police in the ex-Soviet nation said that ‘an 18-year-old woman from Billingham has been arrested in Georgia on suspicion of drugs offences and that she remains in their custody.’
A local report claimed that during an inspection ’34 hermetically sealed packages containing marijuana were found in the passenger’s bag, as well as 20 packages of hashish’.
According to he country’s Interior Ministry, it’s not looking good for Bella: ‘The committed crime envisions up to 20 years – or life imprisonment.’
There are still questions around how Bella ended up in Georgia exactly – and what her steps were in the lead up. Her family said she first flew out to the Philippines just after Easter and flew to Thailand around May 3. Bella had been regularly posting on social media and last shared a picture to Facebook on Monday, May 5, before going quiet.
Given all the above, Bella has already been denied bail following her first court appearance in Tbilisi. I’m sure she will say that she was helping a friend with luggage and didn’t know what was in the suitcase, or that she was forced into it by a Georgian gangster she met on the beach in Thailand or something, but you just can’t see any other outcome than a large prison sentence really.
I mean, smuggling 14kg of cannabis from Thailand to Georgia? That’s just asking for trouble.
Who knows, maybe the British government will negotiate her handover to UK justice, at which point she’ll get away with a slap on the wrist. After all, we already saw that with the two girls who were caught smuggling 35kg of cannabis from New York to Birmingham.
If they avoided jail, then surely Bella will too? Her family better hope that the British government pulls through for them on this one.
