Family’s plea for daughter’s release
THE FATHER of a woman facing years in an Egyptian jail has admitted her family is “terrified” for her.
Neville Plummer, from Hull, said daughter Laura, who has been held for nearly a month after £23 of painkillers were found in her luggage at Hurghada airport, was “disappearing” before their eyes, and they fear she will be unable to cope with a jail sentence.
The painkillers, just under 300 tablets of the opiate Tramadol, were for the use of her Egyptian boyfriend who has a bad back. The family has been told she could face 25 years in jail or even the death sentence. The shop worker is due to face a preliminary court hearing on Thursday. The prescription drugs were found in her luggage which contained other gifts, including shaving gel and aftershave.
Mr Plummer said: “A drug smuggler does it to make money. In Laura’s case she got them for nothing. She wasn’t selling them. There was not profiteering. Why should anyone smuggle so-called dangerous drugs into the country when there was no financial gain?”
More than 5,400 people have signed a petition calling for her to be freed. After her arrest on October 9 Miss Plummer was asked to sign a 38-page document in Arabic, and hoped it would lead to her release. Instead she was imprisoned in a 15ft by 15ft cell with 25 other women. To try to secure her release she and her parents paid a total of £10,000 to two “lawyers” – but they turned out to be con artists. Mr Plummer said his “timid” daughter had expressed suicidal thoughts while in jail, adding: “She is not the baby of the family, but we treat her as the baby of the family.
“We are distraught, upset beyond words and are terrified of the consequences that could happen to Laura.”
East Hull MP Karl Turner, inset, said she was a “decent, lawabiding woman, who has made a really terrible mistake”.
He added: “The British Government have had a long-standing relationship with the Egyptian Government and I hope very much that with the help of the Egyptian authorities we can try to resolve this terrible situation as quickly as possible.”