Boris must act to save girl guilty of only naivety

BY ALISON PHILLIPS Mirror columnist

LAURA Plummer is clearly no international drug smuggler.

Someone with a criminal mind intent on evading Egyptian drugs laws would not have left painkillers in a clear plastic packet at the top of her luggage.

She is – as she now knows all too well – just a naive, unworldly woman who failed to consider the seriousness of drugs laws in other countries. She was literally an innocent abroad.

Now she faces three years in a filthy, stinking hellhole with no decent sanitation, crowded in with dozens of inmates. She is at constant risk of assault and her family say she is terrified.

It is a penalty wildly disproportionate to what she DUTY Minister Boris Johnson

has actually done. Laura is no threat to anyone else and no danger to Egypt. It is the job of Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson to do what he can for Brits who get into trouble abroad and who are unduly harshly treated. There is a responsibility on him now to do everything in his power to get Laura out before she suffers a physical and mental breakdown. I would never defend a drug smuggler whose actions bring misery to others. But Laura is patently nothing of the sort. She inadvertently tripped into this disaster and anyone with a shred of compassion must wish her out of it as swiftly as possible. We must hope that’s what Boris Johnson is trying to achieve.