Michaela McCollum Connolly and Melissa Reid were formally charged on Tuesday with drug smuggling

A NORTHERN Ireland dancer and her Scottish pal are without food and almost lying on a cell floor, a Belfast lawyer has revealed.

Michaela McCollum Connolly and Melissa Reid were formally charged on Tuesday night with trying to smuggle £1.5 million worth of cocaine out of Peru to Spain.

Hours earlier, they were taken in handcuffs from a police compound to a prosecutor’s office in Callao, Lima to hear the police case against them.

It was after this evidence was presented, a prosecutor decided to formally charge them and detain them in a holding cell within the building.

Peter Madden, Ms McCollum Connolly’s lawyer was appalled at the squalid conditions the two girls were being held in.

He said they had been offered no food or blankest on Tuesday and he was concerned for their physical and mental health.

He told MailOnline: “The conditions inside the holding cells are pretty grim.

“They are expected to lie almost on the floor. There is a sort of sponge bed which is not acceptable. It is not clean.

“They have not been offered any food. To me that is unacceptable.”

He added that they a “dirty and cramped cell”, and that he had requested mattresses for them.

Solciitor Peter Madden says the drug mule girls are held in “dirty and cramped” conditions

He said: “Their mood has changed. They are both very shaken and upset.”

The two women continue to protest their innocence.

They claim that they were forced at gunpoint to taken the 11kgs of cocaine by a Columbian crime gang or else their families would be harmed.

However, police have poured cold water on their stories.

The pair could spend up to three year’s in an overcrowded women’s prison waiting for their trial.

And if convicted, could face between and eight and 15 years behind bars.