{"id":244004,"date":"2025-11-04T20:54:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T20:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/244004\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T20:54:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T20:54:09","slug":"bella-culley-arrives-home-after-being-freed-from-georgia-jail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/244004\/","title":{"rendered":"Bella Culley arrives home after being freed from Georgia jail"},"content":{"rendered":"

The teenager, and those waiting to greet her, were met by police at arrivals and escorted through a staff door. <\/p>\n

Miss Culley was detained on 10 May having been arrested at Tbilisi International Airport when 12kg (26lb) of marijuana and 2kg (4.4lb) of hashish were found in her luggage.<\/p>\n

Her family had recently paid \u00a3137,000 to reduce her sentence to two years.<\/p>\n

On Monday her lawyer Malkhaz Salakaia said that prosecutors made the changes to the plea deal and, given her age and pregnancy, decided to free her.<\/p>\n

Miss Culley had previously pleaded guilty to bringing drugs into Georgia, flying from Thailand via Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates.<\/p>\n

She said she was forced to do so by gangsters who tortured her with a hot iron.<\/p>\n

She had initially gone missing while travelling in Thailand<\/a> and her lawyer said Georgian police had launched a separate criminal investigation into her coercion allegations.<\/p>\n

Miss Culley had been held in pre-trial detention since May, first in stark conditions in Georgia’s Rustavi Prison Number Five before being transferred to a “mother and baby” unit<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The teenager, and those waiting to greet her, were met by police at arrivals and escorted through a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-244004","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}