Pregnant Bella Culley ‘toasts bread over a candle flame’ in Georgian prison

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?

Speaking exclusively to the BBC, Bella Culley’s mother reveals her daughter – now 35 weeks pregnant – has been transferred to a prison “mother and baby” unit.

This marks a significant change for the 19-year-old after five months in a cell in Georgia’s Rustavi Prison Number Five, with only a hole in the ground for a toilet, one hour of fresh air daily, and communal showers twice a week.

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.”

Miss Culley has been held in pre-trial detention since May, after police discovered 12kg (26lb) of marijuana and 2kg (4.4lb) of hashish in her hold luggage at Tbilisi International Airport.

Some accounts from inside the jail paint a stark picture of conditions.

In September, Georgian media widely published an open letter they said had been sent from prison by Anastasia Zinovkina, a Russian political activist sentenced to eight-and-a-half years on drug possession charges.

Ms Zinovkina, who insisted the drugs were planted on her, described the sanitary conditions as “appalling” and “horrific”.

“One single bar of soap is used to wash hair, body, socks, underwear, and dishes,” she wrote. “If the soap runs out before the guards decide to give out a new one (which happens once every three months) then they simply don’t wash.

“Toilet paper is provided once monthly, and only to those with no money on their prison account. Showering is permitted only twice weekly – on Wednesdays and Sundays – for 15 minutes.

“The girls who don’t have slippers bathe barefoot or use shared slippers. They get fungal infections and pass them to each other.”

The Georgian Ministry of Justice told the BBC in May that conditions in the prison had significantly improved since earlier monitoring reports by the Georgian Public Defender.

Under Georgia’s new penitentiary code, which came into force in January last year, inmates “have the right to fresh air at least one hour on a daily basis”, it said.

It also highlighted various reforms, including vocational education programmes, a digital university for distance learning, and improved healthcare through an online clinic.

“Georgian authorities put human-centered approach at the heart of the penitentiary reform to ensure the healthy management of prison system,” it said in a statement.

The ministry also said the UN sub-committee on prevention of torture visited the prison in October 2023 and “did not express any concerns regarding the prison conditions, sanitary or issues related to out-of-cell activities/contact with outside world”.

The committee’s report is confidential but the UN said at the time it encouraged the Georgian government to make it public.

The case has drawn attention to Georgia’s strict approach to drug-related offences and its extensive use of “plea bargaining” to resolve criminal cases.

Guram Imnadze, a criminal justice lawyer and drug policy expert based in Tbilisi, says in 2024 nearly 90% of drug-related crimes in Georgia were resolved in this way.

“Sentences are so severe that plea bargaining is in both sides’ interests,” Mr Imnadze explains. “The main strategy from a defence perspective is to have plea bargaining as fast as possible.”

Earlier agreements typically result in softer conditions, with lower sentences and fines, he says.

For trafficking involving large amounts of drugs, Georgian law provides for sentences of up to 20 years or life imprisonment. Mr Imnadze says Miss Culley’s case coincided with a new interior minister taking office, who made drug crimes a priority.

“What they want is to show the public right now what tangible results they have, and 12kg of marijuana is already a huge amount for public perception,” he says.

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”.

Miss Culley’s lawyer, Malkhaz Salakaia, has previously said that, once an agreement was reached, he would appeal to the President of Georgia to pardon the British teenager.

Mr Salakaia confirmed Miss Culley had pleaded guilty to bringing drugs into the country, flying from Thailand via Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, but said she was made to do so by gangsters who tortured her with hot iron.

Georgian police had launched a separate criminal investigation into her coercion allegations, he said.

When the teenager landed in Tbilisi on 10 May, her luggage was immediately flagged by Georgian authorities and, although she attempted to explain to police that someone was supposed to meet her at the arrivals hall, they did not follow this up and charged her, he said.

Mr Salakaia says there is a provision in Georgian law for pregnant women, raising the family’s hopes that the teenager could be released before giving birth.

“It is written in the law that when a child is born, the mother must be outside until the child is one year old,” he says.

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.

“Until then we are just a family doing everything we can for my daughter and grandson.”