A nurse has told of her ordeal after being locked up in a Sri Lankan prison because of a tattoo of Buddha on her arm.
Back at home in Coventry, Naomi Coleman says she was treated like a “common criminal”.
She was arrested at the airport in the capital Colombo after the tattoo of a Buddha seated on a lotus flower was spotted on her right arm.
A judge ruled that she would be deported and was made to spend the days leading up to her flight home in a prison cell and then a detention centre.
Naomi, 37, said: “It was horrific and I was treated like a common criminal just for having a tattoo.
“I was thrown in prison among people who had done all sorts of crimes.”
The nightmare began when Naomi landed at Bandaranaike International Airport, having flown from India, for a holiday which would eventually take her to the Maldives.
She was approached in the airport by a taxi driver and plain-clothed police officer who spotted her tattoo, which Naomi says she has because she is a practising Buddhist.
Naomi was escorted to a nearby police station where she was asked to give a statement.
A police spokesman in Sri Lanka said that she was arrested for “hurting others’ religious feelings” – Buddhism is the religion of the country’s majority ethnic Sinhalese and Buddhist tattoos are seen as culturally insensitive.
“I said I would be happy to just cover the tattoo up and you could tell that not everyone had a problem as one police officer even took a picture of it,” explained Naomi.
“They said I was being deported and would be sent back home, and I was going to spend the night in prison.”
Naomi spent the night with around 60 other women in prison in Negombo near to the airport, where she had nothing but a straw mat to sleep on.
She was eventually able to contact her family and eventually told a flight home was organised for her.
Naomi, a mental health nurse, said: “It was being paid for by the Sri Lankan Tourist Board and was told that none of this should have happened.
“They said they were sorry and offered me a free holiday package to come back!”
Her sister Louise Mockford, 32, said: “The authorities there have disgraced the country for what they have put my sister through. It was disrespectful.
“It worried us all to death.”
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