The former air stewardess from south London who is being held in a prison in Colombo, Sri Lanka, says she has ‘no idea’ how such a copious amount of drugs ended up in her luggage, and says she is struggling to eat the ‘spicy food’ in jail.
Charlotte May Lee, 21, was busted in Sri Lanka for allegedly carrying two suitcases full of a drug known as ‘kush’: a synthetic mixture of cannabis, fentanyl, tramadol and formaldehyde. In total, she was carrying 42kg of the stuff from Bangkok, Thailand, so I’m not sure how she failed to notice it was in her suitcases, or how she would have had enough leftover space in them to fit all those packages.
Charlotte told MailOnline:
‘I had never seen them before. I didn’t expect it all when they pulled me over at the airport. I thought it was going to be filled with all my stuff.’
‘I had been in Bangkok the night before and had already packed my clothes because my flight was really early. So I left my bags in the hotel room and headed for the night out. As they were already packed I didn’t check them again in the morning.’
‘They [the people she believed planted the drugs] were supposed to meet me here. But now I’m here – stuck in this jail.’
Charlotte is being held in a small women’s wing of Negombo Prison in Sri Lanka, where she said she doesn’t have a bed and sleeps on a concrete floor with her ‘jumper as a pillow.’
‘You are only allowed two or three hours outside in the sun a day, occasionally longer if there are a lot of women in court that day.’
‘I’ve not eaten in two days because the food is just too spicy for me. I have told my lawyers – I have three of them – that I need different food. They said they would sort that but they still haven’t. I don’t know why.’
It does seem difficult to believe that Charlotte would have packed her suitcase and then gone for a night out, during which time someone managed to access her accommodation, open her suitcases, and stuff them with 42kg/£1.2 million worth of drugs without letting her know. Wouldn’t that just be a waste of time/money for them?
Then again, who knows? Anything is possible.
Charlotte’s buddies back home in London told press that she was “vague” about her plans when initially jetting off to Thailand, only telling them that she had a “job on a boat.”
It’s a hell of a time for Brits being busted for drugs abroad. Aside from Charlotte May Lee, we’ve also got Bella May Culley looking at life in prison in Georgia for smuggling 14kg of cannabis into the country, and a British dad who has already been sentenced to 40 years in Dubai for being caught with £2,000 of cocaine.
Meanwhile in the UK, girls caught with 35kg of cannabis at Birmingham Airport are let off with a slap on the wrist. Crazy how that works…
