A British teenager - eight months pregnant and charged with drugs smuggling - is awaiting sentencing in prison in Georgia, South Caucasus. A payment of £137,000 by her family will reduce her sentence but what are the days like for Bella Culley, incarcerated 2,600 miles (4,180km) from home?
Who cares? Why the focus on this particular idiot drugs mule? There's plenty of them to choose from...
Lyanne Kennedy says her daughter has been boiling pasta in a kettle and toasting bread over a candle flame but is now allowed to cook for herself and other women and children in the unit, and is learning Georgian. "She now gets two hours out for walking, she can use the communal kitchen, has a shower in her room and a proper toilet," she says, describing the improved conditions since a transfer earlier this month.
"They all cook for each other," Ms Kennedy says. "Bella has been making eggy bread and cheese toasties, and salt and pepper chicken."
Perhaps if she'd showed such skills in a job in her local cafe, she wouldn't have decided to smuggle drugs into a country that unlike the UK, doesn't ptovide holiday camps for the incarcerated felons it houses.
Miss Culley claimed she had been tortured and forced to carry the drugs but was warned she was facing 20 years in prison. But, for a "substantial sum", she could be released, she was told. Back in Tbilisi City Court last Tuesday, the teenager heard her family had managed to raise £137,000. Not the amount needed for her to walk free but enough to reduce her sentence significantly, to two years. She is due in court again on Monday to hear her final sentence. Ms Kennedy says the family is doing everything they can to get her home "where she should be".
And she's now been freed. Blood money is acceptable in such a country, clearly.
Ms Kennedy, who has been traveling back and forth between the UK and Georgia, says her daughter is getting on well with staff and prisoners and she had been able to take in baby clothes for her. Her daughter's full story "will come in time", she says.
No doubt, once she's hired a ghostwriter. I assume the restriction on profiting from crime won't be applicable?
