PREGNANT Bella Culley is set to be sensationally freed from jail despite pleading guilty to drug smuggling.
The British teen has already served six months behind bars in Georgia after cops found £200,000 worth of cannabis stuffed inside her suitcase.
Bella’s family learned just minutes before Monday morning’s final hearing that a new plea bargain deal had been struck at the last minute.
This means Bella will be released imminently, her lawyer has claimed.
The court u-turn is due to be formally confirmed by Judge Giorgi Gelashvili laster today.
It was feared that Bella would have to have her baby while locked up as she is expected to give birth before Christmas.
read more in Bella Culley
The 19-year-old, from Billingham in northeast England, was arrested in Tbilisi airport after flying to Georgia from Thailand in May.
Bella pleaded guilty to the drug smuggling charges but claims she was forced into being a mule.
She told a court she was made to traffic 31lbs worth of drugs by a gang in Bangkok.
They threatened to kill her family if she didn’t do as she was told, the Brit confessed.
She also claimed they burned her with a hot iron and forced her to watch beheading videos.
A court in Tbilisi City delivered the final verdict on Monday morning.
A judge deducted six months from her sentence for time already served on remand.
Bella and her family were already aware of the sentencing after the court announced their verdict last week.
They were left stunned when a judge jailed her for 18 more months despite her family managing to raise £140,000 of a huge £215,000 fine.
But as they failed to hit the target needed, Bella was 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 is due to Bella being only weeks away from giving birth.
She is due to give birth before Christmas after falling pregnant on her disastrous Far East holiday.
This means she will be locked up in a hellhole prison during the birth of her first child.
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 investigation, and 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 will beg for a pardon from Georgian president Mikheil Kavelashvili – a former Manchester City footballer – if Bella wasn’t freed.
It remains unclear if Kavelashvili will listen to their request.
BRUTAL JAIL CONDITIONS
A heavily pregnant Bella has been surviving on pasta boiled in a kettle and bread toasted over a candle in a grim ex-Soviet jail, her mum has revealed.
Lyanne Kennedy, 44, revealed the primitive conditions her daughter has been enduring in the tough Women’s Penitentiary No5 near the capital of Tbilisi.
Lyanne said she is 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.
But the family have now learned that she has been moved to a women and children’s unit and 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.
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”.
