Singapore has hanged another death row inmate convicted of drug trafficking, just days after the last reported execution.
Activist and journalist Kirsten Han confirmed to Coconuts that a 49-year-old Singaporean Malay man, who was convicted of trafficking cannabis, was executed at dawn yesterday.
According to the Transformative Justice Collective, a group fighting to abolish the death penalty in Singapore of which Han is a member, the man had been in prison since 2015 after being sentenced to death.
Han declined to divulge the man’s identity as his family had not given their consent for it to be disclosed.
But she did confirm that he was one of the 17 Malay prisoners who filed a civil case accusing the government of racial bias in the prosecution of capital punishment cases. The case was thrown out last year when the judge decided that it was logically flawed and ruled that it was an abuse of process. M Ravi, the attorney who represented the men in the civil case, was later fined S$20,000 for the failed application.
The Singaporean government does not release information about prisoners on death row or their executions to the public. Most public knowledge about them comes from families who have been notified of their relative’s impending execution.
Singapore seems to have accelerated the pace of executions this year after they were put on pause during the pandemic. This is the sixth execution known to have taken place this year and the first for trafficking cannabis.
Trafficking more than 500 grams of cannabis is punishable by death under Singapore’s harsh drug laws.
The last known execution took place on June 27 and involved a 64-year-old man who was hanged despite desperate final appeals from his family, the public and himself.
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