Nurse describes horror of being locked up for Buddha tattoo

A nurse from Coventry has spoken of her horrific ordeal after being locked up in a Sri Lankan prison owing to a tattoo of Buddha on her arm.

37-year-old Naomi Coleman was heading for her holiday in the Maldives when she arrested at Bandaranaike International Airport, in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, after a plain-clothed police officer spotted the tattoo on her right arm.

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 so Buddhist tattoos are seen as culturally insensitive.

Naomi, a mental health nurse in Longford, was taken to a nearby place station to give a statement, where she explained that she would be happy to cover it up:

The 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 spent her first night with around 60 other women in a prison in Negombo, where she had nothing but a straw mat to sleep on and claims a guard stole £10 of her money in Sri Lankan currency.

She went on to say:

The next day she was taken to the detention centre, two and a half hours away, where she was able to contact her family, after a friend spoke with the British Embassy.

Naomi said she was eventually told a flight home had been organised for her:

Her sister Louise Mockford, 32, said: