Man leaves Japanese prison for UK

Nick Baker has been permitted to serve his remaining sentence in Britain

A man has arrived back in Britain after spending the past six years in a Japanese prison for drug offences.

Nick Baker, 36, from Stroud in Gloucestershire, was caught at an airport in Tokyo with a suitcase containing ecstasy and cocaine.

He claimed that he was carrying the case for a friend and did not know there were drugs inside.

He has always protested his innocence and is being allowed to finish his 11 year term at Wandsworth Prison, London.

Baker always claimed the suitcase belonged to his travelling companion, James Prunier.

Prunier, also from Stroud, killed himself on a railway track near Gloucester in 2004. A inquest jury returned a verdict of suicide.

Baker appealed against his conviction in 2005 but the Japanese court upheld the guilty verdict. The judge reduced his sentence from 14 to 11 years saying that Baker was not the most important figure in the drug smuggling ring.

His mother, Iris Baker, has campaigned for her son's human rights and claims that her son was never given a fair trial and had to endure barbaric prison conditions.