FREED Brit drug mule Bella Culley now faces a race against time to get back to the UK to have her baby boy – and may need special permission to fly due to her advanced pregnancy.
Bella, 19, was finally released from prison in Georgia after serving six months behind bars after cops found £200,000 worth of cannabis stuffed inside her suitcase.
Bella is now due to return home within days to give birth to her first child surrounded by her loved ones rather than terrifying fellow cons.
She fell pregnant on her disastrous Far East backpacking trip where she fell into the clutches of a Thai drug gang.
Bella is expected back home once documentation is signed off and travel is arranged – but may need special permission to fly as she is so heavily pregnant.
Airlines usually allow pregnant women to fly up to the 36th week of a single pregnancy but require a “fit-to-fly”letter from a doctor after 28 weeks.
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It is not clear exactly how far along Bella is, but the teenager is expected to give birth to a boy before Christmas.
Her family were understood to be urgently seeking paperwork with the help of consular staff as she celebrated her dramatic release.
Emotional Bella was heard saying “I’m not in jail anymore” as she left a courthouse in Georgia surrounded by her beaming mum and triumphant lawyer.
Just minutes before Monday morning’s final hearing over Bella’s drug smuggling verdict a new plea bargain deal was struck which allowed for her complete release from jail.
The court U-turn was formally confirmed by Judge Giorgi Gelashvili as Bella was told the news.
An onlooker said: “She was laughing and crying at the same time like she couldn’t believe it.”
Bella, who pleaded guilty to the smuggling charges, was released just minutes after the hearing concluded.
The heavily pregnant teenager was wearing a long fawn coat, t-shirt and leggings as she walked out with her mum by her side as she spoke on the phone to her oil rig technician dad Niel Culley.
Holding the phone to her ear, Bella laughed: “I’m not in jail any more!”
Niel replied: “That’s brilliant!”
She then said a few words outside of the Tbilisi court telling reporters she was “happy and relieved” to be freed.
The young Brit added that she never expected to be allowed to leave jail today.
Her emotional mum Lyanne Kennedy, 44, burst into tears when she was told the teen would walk free.
She sobbed outside court saying: “I am so happy, so happy – I know I don’t look like it, but so happy.
“We’ll need to get her passport and then we leave, either today or tomorrow.”
The 19-year-old, from Billingham in northeast England, was arrested in Tbilisi airport after flying to Georgia from Thailand in May.
Border officers found 31lb of cannabis stashed in her hold baggage.
Bella pleaded guilty but claimed she was forced into being a mule.
She told a court a gang in Bangkok threatened to kill her family if she didn’t do as she was told.
She also claimed they burned her with a hot iron and forced her to watch beheading videos.
Bella and her family were left stunned when a judge jailed her for 18 more months last week despite her family managing to raise £140,000 of a huge £215,000 fine.
As they failed to hit the target needed, Bella was initially handed further time behind bars.
But her lawyer, Malkhaz Salakaia, had asked for an additional hearing as he called for Bella to be released on bail.
Part of his argument was due to Bella being only weeks away from giving birth.
Mr Salakaia pleaded in court: “We would like to ask the judge to schedule one final hearing to pass the final verdict.
“She pleaded guilty, fully cooperated with the investigationand the plea bargain has just been reached.
“So we would like to ask the judge to release her on bail, given her advanced pregnancy.”
Mr Salakaia had also revealed the family would have begged for a pardon from Georgian president Mikheil Kavelashvili – a former Manchester City footballer – if Bella wasn’t freed.
The British Embassy even sent a letter urging Georgia’s president to consider granting a pardon to Bella, sources in the ex-Soviet state said.
Kavelashvili was said to have forwarded the letter to the Pardon Commission for review.
But with the news of Bella’s release the family are all set to return home to the UK this week.
BRUTAL JAIL CONDITIONS
A heavily pregnant Bella had been surviving on pasta boiled in a kettle and bread toasted over a candle in a grim ex-Soviet jail, her mum revealed.
Lyanne Kennedy, 44, revealed the primitive conditions her daughter had been enduring in the tough Women’s Penitentiary No5 near the capital of Tbilisi.
Lyanne said she was allowed just an hour of fresh air a day in the jail’s drab exercise yard and her toilet was a hole in the cell floor.
Bella was finally moved to a women and children’s unit in the weeks before her freedom where she was allowed to cook for herself and other families, while learning Georgian.
Lyanne told the BBC: “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.”
The former Soviet satellite state has been slammed by rights groups for its treatment of its prisoners.
A report by Georgia’s ombudsman into Women’s Penitentiary No. 5 lays bare the prison’s horrific conditions.
The report said: “When prisoners are received at the No.5 Facility,
they are inspected naked and are requested to squat, which the inmates consider degrading treatment.”
The group then details the hygiene problems at the prison, with no running drinking water, clogged drains with dirty water pooled on the bathroom floor, and concrete shower blocks with rusting metal walls, windows with no glass and no privacy.
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No sanitary products are provided to the female inmates, with prisoners forced to fashion sanitary towels or adult nappies from fabric, the ombudsman reported, in an affront to “human dignity”.
A separate report by Human Rights Watch found that Georgia’s prisoners were “severely overcrowded”, threatening the safety of inmates.
Inside the dark world of Brit ‘drug mules’
A SLEW of drug mule arrests involving Brits have emerged in the last 12 months.
In April and May, two Brit women were arrested abroad for alleged drug smuggling.
Bella was the first after she allegedly tried to smuggle a suitcase of cannabis into Georgia.
Meanwhile, former air stewardess Charlotte May Lee was also caught allegedly trying to smuggle drugs worth £1.2million into Sri Lanka.
Her two suitcases were said to have been stuffed with 46kg of a synthetic cannabis strain known as kush — which is 25 times more potent than opioid fentanyl.
If found guilty, South Londoner Charlotte could face a 25-year sentence.
A young mum was detained in Germany for allegedly smuggling cannabis in her bags on a flight from Thailand – in yet another shocking case.
Glamorous Cameron Bradford, 21, from Knebworth, Herts, was detained at Munich Airport on April 21 as she tried to collect her luggage.
It comes as a Brit couple claiming to be tourists from Thailand have been busted with more than 33kg of cannabis in their suitcases at a Spanish airport.
The pair were picked out by suspicious cops at Valencia Airport after displaying a “nervous and evasive attitude” and are now behind bars on drug trafficking charges.
Experts told The Sun how wannabe Brit Insta stars are being lured by cruel gangs into carting drugs across the world.
Then last month, a six-year-old British boy was arrested in Mauritius suspected of smuggling part of a £1.6million dope haul stuffed inside his wheelie case.
The lad was picked up by customs officials along with his mum and five other Brits as they arrived on the tropical island.
Authorities branded the use of a child in the audacious drug smuggling plot as “inhumane”.