ANY Brit heading to Magaluf for a stag do knows to expect the worst – be it mind-splitting hangovers or some seriously dodgy snaps making their way on to Instagram.

However, for Bristol lad David a boozy weekend away with the boys turned into a three-year nightmare after an apparent case of mistaken identity saw him banged up in a brutal Spanish jail.

The dad-of-one was enjoying the last night of a raucous holiday away from his wife and three-month-old boy six years ago when he says his pal sparked a mass brawl and blinded a bouncer.

When David was the only one arrested, he faced the possibility of 13 years behind bars in a jail stuffed with the doorman's angry friends.

Abandoned by his mates who jumped on the first flight back to Britain, he was slammed in a cell with a murderer who had chopped his brother into pieces and left devastated after discovering a prison friend hanged.

With an estimated 247 Brits currently locked up in Spain, his bruising battle for freedom gives an insight into the dire conditions lags face abroad and comes just weeks after another bouncer was horrifically glassed.

It is one of three shocking tales explored in the latest episode of Channel 5's Young, Dumb and Locked Up In The Sun.

'I HAD A PREMONITION IT WOULD GO WRONG'

David's stag weekend had begun like any other. Drinking beers round the pool, the group joked about at their hotel before descending down to the strip for a few nights of "carnage".

"It was the final day when it all went wrong", says David, now 37. "I had a premonition that night that something was going happen."

They headed down to a busy bar where after knocking back the beers, one of his pals was knocked back by a barman walking past. A brawl erupted and David says the bouncer was bottled in the eye by his mate, who angrily kicked out at him instead.

"All I wanted to do was get up off the floor, but every time I did I got about 50 kicks in the face," he says.

"I thought if I keep trying I'm going to die. I'd done nothing to him; he'd kicked the wrong guy."

David was hauled to court, and after two days was charged with grievous bodily harm.

Worse still, while the rest of his group had escaped arrest and flown back to the UK, he found himself living for months awaiting trial in Mallorca's Palma jail, which was stuffed with the doorman’s angry mates.

Locked into the prison’s barbers one day, he was sucker-punched by a raging lag.

I shared cells with murderers. One Spanish guy had chopped his brother up and put him in a freezer

“I feared for my life,” he says. “You have these little punch ups and think this it's how it's going to be. I'm never going to snitch.

“I shared cells with murderers. One Spanish guy had chopped his brother up and put him in a freezer. I'm watching telly and he's on it, and I'm in a cell with the guy.”

Life took a darker turn still when one day, visiting his mate in a cell, David found him swinging from the ceiling and blue-faced, having hanged himself to death.

CRUEL TWIST

The tragedy and thought of missing his son growing up was taking its toll on David, but after six months he received a glimmer of hope.

“My friend confessed to my dad, broke down in tears and said ‘I was the one who did it, not Dave’,” he says. The pal then flew out to Spain to be picked out in a fresh line-up by the bouncer.

But the nightmare was just beginning as the doorman pointed at David. Threatened with paying £65,000 in damages or spending 13 years in prison, he says the bouncer was fearful of changing his story and even drove his pal out of the country by threatening his life.

“I can see why he fled, but I was left in the sh*t. I spoke to him on the phone and said if I get the main court, will you say it was you? He said ‘I'm never coming back’.”

David’s life was thrown into crisis. He lost his job while his dad was forced to take out a bank loan and “sell pretty much everything he’d got” to fork up the £65,000 so his son could take a shorter sentence.

“You're pushed into saying that you're guilty,” he says. “They pushed me because you're offered more years if you don't.”

Having raised the money, he pushed to serve the rest of his sentence in England. He spent two months in a Madrid jail before transferred to Wandsworth and Peterborough prison – finally let out after a gruelling three years.

His pal eventually paid his father back £8,000, but the scars may never heal.

He says: “I've got a message for the doorman: you got the wrong guy and totally ruined my life. I don't know if I could ever forgive you.”

MOST READ IN NEWS

David’s ordeal isn’t the only drinking disaster in the episode – as Nick Bass gets into trouble for too much clowning around.

After a hundred-shot beer challenge, the Sheffield lad found himself cuffed Down Under when he ran riot through a circus, trying to ride an elephant and stealing a £2,000 clown costume.

Meanwhile, when Kai Sing, 29, from Warwick overstayed his visa in China, he feared an impromptu drug test would see him locked up for life.

Slammed in a bedless cell and threatened by shank-weilding inmates, his incarceration was instead a rare insight into the country’s bizarre propaganda and ingenious ways of fooling the British embassy.

Earlier this year, we revealed how Magaluf ‘mafia’ gangs are targeting ‘up to 100 drunk tourists a night’ with ‘bearhug’ robberies in a fresh crime wave.

Young, Dumb and Banged Up in the Sun airs on 5Star at 9pm

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