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Singapore hangs Australian drug smuggler
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-12-03 09:42
Singapore executed an Australian heroin trafficker on Friday despite a
warning by Australia's prime minister that the hanging would sour relations
between their countries.
Posters of
convicted Australian drug smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van rest beside a candle
during a vigil in the hours leading to his execution in Singapore December
2, 2005. [AP] |
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The case has caused an outcry in Australia where opponents of the execution
held vigils in cities around the country, with bells and gongs sounding 25 times
at the hour of Nguyen's execution.
"I just think it's barbaric, it's wrong, it's disturbing," said Elizabeth
Welch, a 54-year-old counselor at a vigil in Sydney.
Vietnam-born Tuong Van Nguyen, 25, was hanged before dawn despite numerous
appeals from Australian leaders for his life to be spared. He received a
mandatory death sentence after he was caught with 14 ounces of heroin at the
city-state's Changi Airport in 2002, en route from Cambodia to Australia.
Nguyen's death came amid fresh debate about capital punishment in the United
States, where North Carolina's governor denied clemency to a man who killed his
wife and father-in-law. Kenneth Lee Boyd was executed by lethal injection early
Friday in the 1,000th execution in the United States since the death penalty
resumed in 1977.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard said his government would not take
diplomatic action against Singapore. But he said the execution will affect
relations "on a people-to-people, population-to-population basis."
Dressed in black, a dozen friends and supporters stood outside the
maximum-security Changi Prison hours before the 6 a.m. hanging. Candles and
handwritten notes containing sympathetic messages and calls for an end to
Singapore's death penalty were placed outside the prison gates.
Nguyen's twin brother, Nguyen Khoa, entered the prison compound, but did not
attend the execution. As he left, he hugged a prison officer and shook the hand
of another. Nguyen Tuong Van had said he was trafficking heroin to help pay off
his twin's debts.
Singapore says its tough laws and penalties for drug trafficking are an
effective deterrent against a crime that ruins lives, and that foreigners and
Singaporeans must be treated alike. It said Nguyen's appeals for clemency were
carefully considered.
"We take a very serious view of drug trafficking 錕斤拷 the penalty is death,"
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said Thursday during a visit to Germany.
Nguyen was caught with more than 26 times the 0.53 ounces of heroin that
draws a mandatory death penalty. The Home Affairs Ministry statement said the
amount was enough to supply 26,000 doses of heroin, and had a street value of
nearly $800,000.
Australia scrapped the death penalty in 1973 and hanged its last criminal in
1967, while Singapore has executed more than 100 people for drug-related
offenses since 1999.
According to local media, Singapore has granted clemency to six inmates on
death row 錕斤拷 all Singaporeans 錕斤拷 since independence in 1965.
A private Mass was held for Nguyen at a chapel on the grounds of a Roman
Catholic convent. He was to be buried in Melbourne.
Physical contact between Nguyen and visitors had been barred in past days.
But one of his Australian lawyers, Julian McMahon, said Nguyen's mother, Kim,
had been allowed to hold her son's hand and touch his face during her last visit
on Thursday.
"That was a great comfort to her," McMahon said.
Nguyen's supporters outside the prison included Gopalan and Krishnan
Murugesu, teenage twin brothers whose father, Shanmugam, was executed in May
after he was caught with 2.2 pounds of marijuana on Aug. 29, 2003, as he
returned from Malaysia by motorcycle.
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