Former drugs mule gives stark warning amid Bella Culley and Charlotte Lee cases

A former drug mule - jailed for ten years on her first smuggling trip - has a stark warning for the rising numbers of young Brits going down the same path.

Natalie Welsh said the traffickers who persuade youngsters to carry a suitcase of drugs onto an airplane are the “best salespeople in the ”. But the picture they paint of a risk free trip is a tissue of lies designed simply to get them on that flight. In reality the drug mule is the most “expendable” link in the lucrative international drugs trade who “nobody cares about”.

The number of Brits languishing in foreign jails on charges has doubled in barely a year, new stats reveal. The charity Prisoners Abroad has seen 43 new cases in the first seven weeks of this year - almost one a day - and this is twice the rate in 2024.

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, from Teeside, was arrested on May 11 at Tbilisi International Airport, in Georgia, accused of transporting 14kg of cannabis, after flying from Bangkok. The 18-year-old has told a court she is pregnant. 21-year-old , from south London, jetted from the and was arrested in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the following day. She claims the 46kg of synthetic cannabis called kush was planted in her luggage. Both deny the offences.

Thailand is one of the countries from where the . Officers seized 27 tonnes of the drug at UK airports last year - up from just two tonnes in 2022.

Natalie Welsh said of Bella and Charlotte: “I just feel for them. I imagine at the moment they are not going to be accepting the reality of the situation. I read they are facing up to 20 and 25 years in prison. One is 21, the other is 18. It is just so sad. They have their whole lives ahead of them.”

Speaking in general terms of others who have been guilty of smuggling, she added: “Why are so many young people wanting to do this? Why are they so desperate for money? Are their wages not enough, is it the cost of living? Can’t people afford to pay their way through university and training? Whatever the money is, it won’t be much but they will be thinking it will go a long way in south east Asia. The mule takes the biggest risk and gets the lowest pay for it. Compared to what it’s going to be sold for it’s pennies. Everyone else is making the money. The mule is the expendable one. Nobody cares about them.”

Cannabis has been decriminalised in Thailand and Natalie said: “They will be told if you get caught here they will just take it off you. They are probably told that if it’s going through transit there is nothing to worry about, it just gets taken off one plane and put on another and doesn’t go through Xray machines. And they have probably been told that at the receiving end everybody has been paid off and they are expecting it. They would definitely have people telling them it’s going to be fine. These are the best salespeople in the world, if they can convince somebody to take a suitcase load of drugs on a plane.”

45-year-old former one-time drugs mule Natalie was 21 and with her three-year-old daughter when she was caught at an airport in Venezuela with a suitcase with £300,000 worth of given to her by a man she had met just days earlier. She said: “He told me that everybody knew what was going on. At the airport I would be taken to one side but not to worry, that was all part of it. They knew what was going on, they had been paid off and not to panic. So when they did come for me, my heart still went. But I just thought it was part of the plan.

“They had the suitcase open. I am telling my daughter all sorts of nonsense, keeping calm for her but actually sh***ing myself. They had taken all the stuff out on this steel table, with a single lightbulb in this cold room. It gives me the sweats just thinking about it. As soon as they pulled the knife out and went to the suitcase with the knife I knew that wasn’t part of the plan and it was game over.”

Her trip to South America was arranged by a London Yardie drugs gang and she thinks she was picked on because she was a crack addict and an “easy target”. She explained: “I had a raging drug addiction which is how I got involved with the people who recruited me. I was easily manipulated but I also accept responsibility for my own actions. Nobody put a gun to my head or forced me to make the decisions that I made. But I had no support. I was a bit of a loner. The drug had got a hold of me so quickly. I had isolated myself from my friends because I was so embarrassed and ashamed I didn’t want to be around them.”

She was hanging out with other addicts in Gloucester and involved in petty crime before meeting a London drugs gang who told her how she could make more money. “I was not supposed to get the job,” she explained. “I was supposed to be just getting some information and feeding it back to others. But when I went to meet the big man to talk about the job, I just thought what he was offering me was what these other guys wanted me to do back home.

“I thought it would be my escape from drug addiction. How an addict's mind works is just insane. “I would get away and I would stop taking drugs and I would come back and I would be clean and I would never take the drugs again. To me it was a lot of money, but it was pennies really. It was £4,000 and I had never seen or heard of £4,000 in my life. It seemed like a huge amount of money. I was 21, I was on benefits. 10 years in prison didn’t even cross my mind. I was told that it was a cert.”

Natalie said she was taken to the home of an older successful drug mule who “glamorised it”. “She was in her late 20s, she had a nice house, nice clothes, nice things - she had everything that I didn’t. She told me she had done the trip herself, she talked me through it. She did a good job on me. I was lonely and I thought she was my friend.”

The gang moved fast, Natalie said: “I was on the trip after a week. They don’t want you to have time to tell people what’s going on or think about what you are doing." Natalie doesn’t know how many others they persuaded to make the same trip or where the gang are now. She said she wrote to the address where she had met the older mule from prison in Venezuela and they sent her £200 but she never heard from them again.

Her child was sent back ton England and after four-and-a-half years in horrific jail conditions she escaped with the help of a prison guard she had formed a relationship with. After many years of struggles with her addictions, Natalie is clean but concerned about what she says is rising levels of drug addictions among the young. Natalie has written a book about her experience, called Escape from Venezuela's Deadliest Prison.