A British gran caught smuggling £1million worth of cocaine on a cruise liner has died alone and in severe pain in her cramped jail cell.
Susan Clarke, 72, passed away from breast cancer on October 10 in the Portuguese prison where she was serving an eight-year sentence.
The Mirror reports that as her condition deteriorated she was allowed one last visit from her partner Roger, 73, two years after they were locked up in separate cells.
A source stated Susan had been due to return to England to finish her jail term and being without her family in her final moments must have been "torture".
They said: “She was handed a life sentence – left to die in a foreign prison with no loved ones around her.
“Four weeks ago she was given one last visit with Roger. They saw each other through a Perspex window.
“She had a lump in her throat which meant she couldn’t actually speak.
“She was battling breast cancer but the doctors in Portugal decided that there was nothing they could do for her, so they stopped her treatment.
“She was in so much pain. Roger seems to think they had won a battle to come back to the UK to, so he’s devastated that she wasn’t well enough to make the move.”
The couple were arrested after a tip-off as the Marco Polo liner sailed into Lisbon from the Caribbean in December 2018.
Police found 20lb of cocaine in the linings of four suitcases.
They claimed they had been conned by crooks into carrying them – but both were jailed for eight years in September 2019.
Prosecutors said the pair were drug mules smuggling cocaine destined for the UK who used four cruises in two years as a front for their crimes making up to £26,500 per trip.
Susan was put in Lisbon’s rat-infested EP Tires prison, where she shared a 10x10ft cell with three others. It is home to serious offenders, including murderers.
Six months after being sentenced, the former secretary told us she had lost two-and-a-half-stone, and feared she wouldn’t make it out of prison alive.
“My health is terrible. I’ve been handed a death sentence. My worry is I’ll be leaving in a box.”
Susan, who has eight grandchildren and one great grandchild, wept as she went on: “We feel completely abandoned. The Foreign Office has ignored us, Boris Johnson has not helped.
"I can understand why people might believe we are guilty but we are not.”
The couple, from Chatham, Kent, who claimed they thought they were smuggling exotic fruit, were earlier caught smuggling 240kg of cannabis into Norway in 2010.
After serving time, they moved to a villa in Guardamar, on Spain’s Costa Blanca.
Roger has now been transferred from his cell in the EP Lisboa jail to a lower-security site.
The Foreign Office said: “We are supporting the family of a British woman who died in Portugal.
Lisbon’s EP Tires is home to 400 female prisoners, including killers.
Housed in 10ft-square cells infested with rats, they are put to work making clothes, carpets or other items and given lessons in home economics, languages and maternal care.
Brit inmates have included carer Sophie Grey, then 25, from Llangovan, Wales, who spent more than three months there while accused of assaulting a policeman in 2017, before being released.
At the time, dad Roger said: “They have two hours where they are allowed out into a concrete yard but that’s it. It’s bleak.”
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