How the British girl caught with record cannabis haul in Sri Lanka is telling police it’s all the fault of a mystery man called Dan she met on a beach

As her plane soared high into the sky above Bangkok, Charlotte May Lee wasted no time getting settled in.

SriLankan Airlines Flight UL 405 had barely left the runway before the 21-year-old part-time beautician from Surrey slapped on a hydrating in-flight facial mask and stuck in her earphones.

If the former Tui air stewardess was nervous about what lay in store for her in Sri Lanka then she showed no sign.

A brief video filmed just a few minutes into her three-hour 15-minute flight and immediately posted on TikTok shows her staring defiantly into the camera as the Thai coastline disappears through the window behind her.

She didn’t look quite so cocky in the police mugshot taken later that day at Bandaranaike International Airport after a staggering 101lb (46kg) of super-strong, synthetic ‘kush’ cannabis was found stashed in her luggage.

It is the largest haul ever discovered at the airport in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo.

If convicted of drug smuggling, Charlotte faces up to 25 years in a tough maximum-security jail.

Now an exclusive investigation by the Mail can reveal details of this young British woman’s dramatic interrogation by police and the account – or accounts – she desperately gave them when asked to explain the colossal quantity of drugs allegedly found in her bags.

For while she insists she is innocent, police sources in Colombo have told us she has already changed her story several times, ultimately claiming that a British man – someone she had spent just three days with in the Thai holiday resort of Koh Phi Phi – must be to blame for the illegal haul.

The man, said by Charlotte to be British but of Pakistani origin and apparently known to her only as ‘Dan’, allegedly bought her airline ticket, telling her he had to remain in Bangkok to see a friend but would join her soon.

He also provided and packed her suitcases and gave her cash for the airline’s excess baggage fee, allegedly telling her that one of the pieces of luggage she checked in held his own clothes and belongings.

Sri Lanka, she claims ‘Dan’ told her, was a ‘lovely place for a holiday’. He promised they would have a ‘wonderful time’ travelling around the country.

Describing roofer’s daughter Charlotte as ‘desperate and incredibly naive’, Sri Lankan police sources say that when they asked for further details about the mysterious ‘Dan’, Charlotte claimed not to know his surname, where he comes from in the UK, or even to have his phone number.

She has also insisted she has never previously visited Sri Lanka, but the police dispute this. They say she flew into the country in January, although it is not yet clear from where. 

‘This woman is in a lot of trouble and will not help herself by failing to tell the truth,’ a police source told the Mail.

‘The investigation is only just beginning and we will be looking closely at her previous visit, who she was with and where she went.’

To be clear, Sri Lankan police do not believe Charlotte’s story. They are examining her phone and retracing her steps with the help of Thai and British authorities, a painstaking inquiry which will involve tracking down CCTV in Bangkok. 

In the meantime, she has received visits from British consular officials.

Meanwhile, this unfortunate – or foolhardy – young woman languishes in Negombo prison just north of the Sri Lankan capital, deprived of the high-fashion clothing and make-up she wears in the copious selfies she posts on social media, complaining that the spicy food is inedible.

Earlier this week, the Mail visited Charlotte in prison, when she claimed she’d never seen the drugs nor been to Sri Lanka before, and had only decided to visit while she waited for her Thai visa to be renewed. 

She insisted, ‘I know who did it’ when asked who, if not her, was really to blame. ‘I didn’t expect it at all when they pulled me over in the airport,’ she said, speaking through the bars of her cell to the Mail’s reporter. ‘I thought it was going to be filled with all my stuff.

‘I had been in Bangkok the night before and had already packed my clothes because my flight was really early. I left my bags in the hotel bedroom and headed for the night out. 

‘As they were already packed I didn’t check them again in the morning.’ She added: ‘They [the people she believed had planted the drugs] were supposed to meet me here. But now I’m stuck here in this jail.’

So is it really possible that Charlotte was duped into becoming a drugs mule by a British drugs gang operating in Thailand? And should we read anything into the track she chose to accompany

the video selfie she filmed, mid-air – a recent hip-hop song with

lyrics about how to charm women by showering them with extravagant luxuries?

Back in Coulsdon, south London, where Charlotte grew up and was a pupil at Woodcote High School, a close friend said this week that she’d ‘been through a tough year’ and had recently got out of an abusive relationship.

The friend added: ‘Her mental state is fragile. She’s vulnerable. She’s a silly 21-year-old but not silly enough to do something like this.’ As the friend pointed out: ‘She was trained as Tui cabin crew. She knew the risks.’

Above all, given her professional experience, she would have been perfectly aware of the ultimate security question asked at check-in by all international airlines: ‘Did you pack your bags yourself?’

Charlotte’s arrest on May 12 came just two days after that of 18-year-old Bella Culley from Billingham in County Durham at Shota Rustaveli airport in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, after flying from Bangkok – within hours of Charlotte – and travelling via Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates.

Bella is alleged to have been carrying 26.4lb (12kg) of cannabis and 4.4lb (2kg) of hashish in her luggage with a street value of £200,000.

She is now being held in the former Soviet state’s grim Prison Number 5 in Rustavi where, in an alarming turn of events, she told officials she is pregnant, something prison authorities have yet to confirm.

The detention of both young women comes at a time when British and Thai authorities have warned of a boom in organised crime gangs in Thailand who are grooming young tourists from the UK to use as drug mules.

According to Tony Saggers, the National Crime Agency’s former head of Drugs Threat and Intelligence: ‘There will be typical sales pitch – that it’s a tried and tested route, that they’ve got people on the inside that will help to corrupt the process, that they’ve got couriers who have recently travelled who haven’t been caught.

‘It will be that if you’ve got no convictions you’re unlikely to go to prison, that no one who works for them so far has been caught.

‘When you add them up and then put a few thousands pounds of rewards on the end of that, it actually sounds like quite a reassuring recruitment campaign.’

Charlotte, who had been training to be a lash technician at a beauty salon in Chipstead, Surrey, first flew out to Thailand in April to celebrate her 21st birthday with her older sister, Sophie, who travelled to meet her from Australia where she lives.

Photographs on her Instagram page show her in Bangkok on April 5, Koh Samui on April 8 and Phuket on April 18. 

She returned to the UK towards the end of the month, telling one friend that she ‘loved Thailand and wanted to work out there’. Others say she had fallen in love with a British guy she referred to as ‘Rocko’.

Around four weeks ago, she announced she’d found a job on one of the party boat ‘booze cruises’ which tour Koh Phi Phi, an archipelago of six stunning islands off Thailand’s west coast and a popular tourist destination.

Before returning to Thailand she had work done on her teeth, had hair extensions fitted and bought designer bags and trainers.

Our sources in Sri Lanka say she told police that she met ‘Dan’ on the island of Koh Phi Phi Don. 

From the description she gave them, they believe Charlotte was staying with the Brit at the three-star Papaya Phi Phi resort.

According to former Sri Lankan investigator Shanti Mendis: ‘A young woman travelling alone from a known country like Thailand with an excess of luggage – double the normal maximum – for a holiday would have been a red flag.

 It may be that from the airline manifest they were aware of it, but my understanding is that it was not a tip-off from Thai police.

‘Both customs and police have spotters in the airport, looking for potential smugglers. They could not believe the quantities they found inside the bags. It is huge – the amount that would come by sea rather than aircraft.’

Bella Culley set off to the Philippines from the UK earlier this month on what was meant to be a last hurrah holiday before settling down to a nursing course.

In a phone call, she told her mother Lyanne that instead of flying on to Ibiza in Spain, as her friend was doing, she was going backpacking through Thailand and possibly meeting up with a boy – or a group of boys – that she knew from home.

A legal source in Georgia says that she went to Thailand ‘for love’ while Bella’s 80-year-old grandfather William Culley said she had gone to visit someone called ‘Ross or Russ’.

A family friend of Bella’s meanwhile told the Mail last week that she had met suspicious men from Liverpool weeks before her arrest who they believe may have been involved in smuggling drugs.

Another family friend told the Sun earlier this week that they believed she had been ‘completely exploited’ after getting involved with drug runners.

Organised crime gangs from across the UK, some of whom have been pushed abroad by rival groups from countries like Albania, have re-established themselves in Thailand over the past decade. 

They collaborate with local drugs cartels and cannabis growers in the north of the country which in 2022 became the first in Asia to decriminalise the drug.

In recent weeks, the Thai government has said it plans to re-criminalise cannabis, aside from medical usage, raising the possibility that gangs are attempting to smuggle as much as they can out of the country before the clampdown.

In March, Thai police arrested 13 foreign nationals, mainly British, for attempting to smuggle 826lb (375kg) out of the country at Koh Samui airport.

Just last month, alleged British cannabis kingpin 30-year-old Adel Mohammed was arrested in Bangkok alongside 11 fellow UK nationals. 

All are accused of trying to flood London with cannabis grown in farms on the Thai island of Koh Samui.

Teenagers and younger adults visiting Thailand in the weeks and months ahead are being told to remain vigilant if they are approached by fellow Brits offering ‘easy money’.

As Tony Saggers puts it: ‘It’s just the human psyche that you feel less intimidated when sitting in a bar chatting to a fellow Brit. 

You almost become even more reassured that the risks aren’t quite what you fear them to be because it’s a fellow Brit telling you everything will be all right.’

Whatever the truth about the drugs allegedly found in their bags, it is clear that Charlotte May Lee and Bella Culley are far from alright.

Both girls were drawn to Thailand by its glamorous, hedonistic party scene. Both now face months, if not years, of waiting to find out their fate in the harshest of prisons.

Innocent or guilty, the ongoing agony of their situations serves as a powerful warning about the realities of the evil underworld lurking beneath the glamour of Thailand’s sunny beaches and what lies in wait for those tempted to delve into it.