Metropolis-state hangs 39-year-old driver over 54 grams of heroin regardless of worldwide strain to halt executions.
Singapore has carried out its third execution for drug offences in a bit of over per week, hanging a 39-year-old citizen for trafficking 54 grams of heroin.
Mohamed Shalleh Abdul Latiff, an ethnic Malay who labored as a supply driver, was hanged at Changi Jail after receiving due course of, Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau stated on Thursday.
The bureau stated the seized quantity of heroin was sufficient to produce greater than 600 drug abusers for per week.
Mohamed Shalleh’s hanging comes solely days after authorities within the city-state executed Saridewi Binte Djamani, 45, and Mohd Aziz bin Hussain, 57, for drug trafficking, prompting an outcry from the United Nations and human rights organisations.
Singapore, which is thought for its harsh punishment of crime, has executed 16 folks, together with foreigners, for narcotics offences since ending a two-year pause on hangings throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Throughout his trial, Mohamed Shalleh had argued {that a} good friend he owed cash to had tricked him into believing he was delivering contraband cigarettes.
A Singapore decide rejected Mohamed Shalleh’s defence after ruling that their relationship was not shut sufficient to justify that degree of belief.
Singapore’s newest software of the loss of life penalty is probably going so as to add to rising worldwide strain on the Southeast Asian nation to reform its drug legal guidelines.
Final month, the Workplace of the United Nations Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights known as for a moratorium on Singapore’s use of the loss of life penalty, calling it “inconsistent with the elemental proper to life and to the best to be free from torture and different inhuman therapy”.
Regardless of Singapore’s picture as a extremely environment friendly worldwide monetary centre, the city-state’s therapy of drug offenders places it within the firm of a small variety of authoritarian states akin to China and North Korea.
The Southeast Asian nation’s legal guidelines mandate capital punishment for anybody who traffics greater than 500 grams of hashish and 15 grams (0.5 ounces) of heroin.
Rights teams akin to Amnesty Worldwide and Human Rights Watch argue that the regulation does little to cease drug abuse and disproportionately impacts low-level offenders.
Singapore’s authorities, which tightly restricts impartial media, public protest and political opposition, has defended its use of the loss of life penalty as an efficient deterrent in opposition to crime and cited surveys displaying a robust majority of residents help the regulation.
