Singapore, Jul 26 (EFE).- A 56-year-old man convicted of drug trafficking was executed in Singapore on Wednesday, the third carried out this year in the city-state, with another scheduled in two days.
Kirsten Han, a coordinator for the NGO Transformative Justice Collective that calls for the abolition of capital punishment in Singapore, confirmed the execution.
“Rest in Power, Mohd Aziz bin Hussain, executed by the Singapore state this morning,” she wrote on Twitter.
The Singaporean Malay man was hanged for trafficking around 50 grams of heroin.
His family received notification of the execution last week, under the usual procedure of informing relatives just one week in advance.
Another killing has been scheduled for Friday. Saridewi Djamani, a 45-year-old Singaporean, was sentenced to death for trafficking around 30g of heroin. If the execution goes ahead, it will be the first of a woman in the country since 2004.
At least two other hangings have been carried out by Singapore this year, the last in May and both cases concerning cannabis.
The first, in April, was of a 46-year-old man convicted of conspiring to traffic 1 kilo of cannabis. The execution was described as “outrageous” by human rights organizations, and the United Nations asked Singapore to halt it over concerns about due process and respect for fair trial guarantees, since the man’s lawyers and relatives said he had never touched or seen the drug.
Singapore has one of the most draconian drug laws in the world, and provides for the death penalty for a minimum of 500g of cannabis trafficking and 15g of heroin.
After a halt in executions for two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Singapore accelerated executions last year by hanging 11 prisoners in just a few months, including one with intellectual disabilities whose sentence for drug trafficking also drew criticism from the international community. EFE
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