'I spent six years in brutal Indian prison – evil killers were stunned by my porn stash'

After a British man was wrongly convicted of being a drugs smuggler in India, he was sentenced to 20 years locked up with gangsters and terrorists – but everything changed when he befriended a lag

A Manchester bloke who was locked up in a brutal Indian prison stunned hardened gangsters and killers with his porn collection.

Barry Hulse lived in grim conditions with no luxuries and precious little food.

But after he befriended another lag, Santosh, who was an influential gangster on the outside, Barry’s life began to change.

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He recalled: “When I had it all boxed off in there with Santosh, I was getting my mail in without them checking it…so I started getting pornographic magazines.”

Barry’s porn stash immediately got the attention of his fellow-prisoners.

He continued: “It's such a taboo in India, even though they made the Kama Sutra you know…”

Barry was inundated with requests from fellow lags, all begging for loan of his porno mags.

“Honest to God, every five minutes there was someone asking to borrow it,” he told the Shaun Attwood podcast.

“Why do you want to borrow it today?” He would ask them “it's a long lock-in is it?”

“They’d never seen naked women, so they're like kids – you know – in a toy shop. It was always happening – madness!”

Despite the possibility of raising a little extra cash by asking his cellmates to pay a rental fee, Barry would just lend the magazines out for nothing: “I would just give them to them… they would come back with a few pages missing.”

Even the prison guards would beg Barry for a look at the racy pictures.

But it wasn’t always quite so easygoing.

Barry, who says he was wrongly imprisoned after a “so-called” friend sent a massive shipment of sleeping pills through the post under his name, spent six years in the prison under appalling conditions.

The bedbugs, he says, were “as big as ladybirds”.

Their bites would “give you like little lumps and stuff … but the worst things were the tiny ants, red ants".

He added: "So um basically you used to put your washing on a line – I made the fatal error a few times where I've put my boxer shorts without shaking them out and then these little red ants are biting my balls and stuff.

"Many times I've had them in my food,” he added. “You get rice and daal every every day mix it up and I'll be eating away and then I'd see one floating and I'd be like ‘f*** it’ I'm just gonna eat it …you know … it’s a bit of protein”.

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