Bangkok, Apr. 27, (dpa/GNA) - An apparently mentally disabled man has been executed in Singapore, despite international protests, for smuggling drugs, the national news channel Bernama TV reported on Wednesday.
Citing the man’s brother, the report said that the 34-year old Malaysian man had been hanged on Wednesday.
His family and human rights organizations had tried to prevent the execution until the end, but an appeal court had rejected pleas for clemency and confirmed the guilty verdict on Tuesday.
The man had been arrested in 2009 for trying the enter the city-state with 43 grams of heroin. He was 21 at the time.
A medical expert found him to have an IQ of 69, a level considered as a cognitive disability. He was nonetheless sentenced to death in 2010, as the judges decided that he was aware he was breaking the laws of the country.
“Several medical professionals found his intellectual and cognitive capacity to be limited, which could have impaired his risk evaluation and his account of the circumstances of the crime,” human rights organization Amnesty International said at the end of last year, emphasizing that an execution would violate international law.
The execution was due to take place last November, but it was delayed after he tested positive for Covid-19.
The EU and experts of the United Nations (UN) had protested the verdict. Even yesterday, the man’s mother tried to prevent the execution, according to a report by the Straits Times.
“I want to have my son back alive, your honour,” she said, according to the report.
The man’s body will be returned to Malaysia and buried in his home town of Ipoh on Friday, according to a report by Malaysian newspaper The Star.
Singapore’s drug laws are extremely strict and can carry the death penalty.
GNA