Singapore: Two persons including an Indian-origin Malaysian man were executed on Thursday in Singapore for drug smuggling.
Kalwant Singh has been sentenced to death after he was found guilty of bringing heroin into the city-state in 2016. The other man to be hanged was Singaporean Norasharee Gous, 48.
Kalwant Singh is the second Indian-origin Malaysian to be hanged by Singapore authorities in the past three months; in April Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, 34, was executed for drug trafficking.
So far this year Singapore has hanged four people despite calls to abolish the death penalty.
A Singapore court on Wednesday turned down a last-minute appeal from Kalwant Singh, whose lawyers had argued he had given information that helped arrest a key suspected drug trafficker.
The appeal was dismissed after the Central Narcotics Bureau said it did not use information he had provided. “We dismiss the application for a stay…” chief justice Sundaresh Menon said.
On Singh’s behalf the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network had also intervened, writing to the Singapore embassy, asking for the execution to be suspended.
It was also pointed out Kalwant Singh had been forced to make drug deliveries to Singapore to repay a football gambling debt.
In Singapore the death penalty is mandatory for those convicted of trafficking 15 grams or more of pure heroin. However, a judge can commute the sentence to life in prison if the offender acted only as a courier and cooperated with authorities. One of the co-accused in Kalwant Singh’s case had his sentence commuted after he cooperated with investigators.
