Adam Whittington, the dual Australian-British citizen jailed in Lebanon last month over a bungled "child recovery" operation, has been denied bail by a Beirut court.
Whittington has been in custody for 43 days, most of it spent sitting in a cramped cell in the remand centre beneath the Palace of Justice in Beirut suburb of Baabda.
Along with his colleague Craig Michael and two Lebanese men, Khaled Barbour and Mohammed Hamza, Whittington was left out of a deal that resulted in the release on bail of Australian mother Sally Faulkner, whose children were at the heart of the saga, and a 60 Minutes team in Lebanon to film the recovery.
The Nine Network's decision to abandon the men they hired to snatch Lahela, 5 and Noah, 3, as they were walking with their Lebanese grandmother along a Beirut street has drawn sustained criticism from Whittington's family and his lawyer.
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Whittington's lawyer Joe Karam said he would be lodging an appeal against the decision to refuse bail and noted he had yet to be formally informed of the court's decision.
"We are happy that the process is moving. It was locked in without any decision for two weeks," he said.
"It will now have another chance to be looked at by three other judges. We are confident we will have fair treatment."
The appeal process could take anywhere between 48 hours and 10 days, Karam said, describing it as a complicated case to hear.
He confirmed Whittington and his three co-accused were transferred from the remand centre in Beirut to a prison in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli on Friday. Along with Faulkner, journalist Tara Brown and her 60 Minutes crew, the men were arrested soon after the April 6 operation, which involved wresting the children from their grandmother's hands.
The moment was caught on CCTV, providing grainy evidence of the frightening altercation.
Faulkner's lawyer Ghassan Moughabghab says she was desperate to see her children after their father, 32-year-old Ali Elamine took them for a three-week holiday to Lebanon in May 2015 and refused to return them to Faulkner in Australia.
Faulkner, Brown, producer Stephen Rice, sound recordist David Ballment and cameraman Ben Williamson spent almost two weeks in prison before Elamine agreed to drop personal charges of kidnap against them in return for what is believed to be a significant payout - reportedly up to $A500,000 - from Nine.
The network had already paid a large sum for the story that aimed to document the recovery of the two children.
The 60 Minutes team is not yet in the clear - the public prosecutor is still considering whether to press charges of kidnap and belonging to a criminal gang, which attract a maximum sentence of three and 10 years respectively.
Whittington's father David and friend Susan Brown said they were devastated by Wednesday's court decision.
"We'd got our confidence very high and he was very confident himself that he would get bail but unfortunately there's a stumbling block every time," David Whittington told Sky News.
He said his son would have been out weeks ago if they had enough money to pay Elamine.
"He's digging his heels in because Channel Nine set the precedent of $US500,000." Brown said Whittington's wife had sold off some of their assets to come up with the money but it was nowhere near $500,000.
"Adam is not a wealthy man, he's a battler just like all of us," she said. They said Nine had turned their back on Whittington, leaving him in a "hell hole" and refusing to acknowledge his existence while blocking his supporters on social media.
