Singapore executes Malaysian drug trafficker in the city-state’s 11th execution of the year

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — A Malaysian man was hanged in Singapore on Thursday for drug trafficking, raising the number of executions in the city-state to 11 this year despite renewed calls to abolish the death penalty.

The execution of Datchinamurthy Kataiah, 39, occurred Thursday afternoon after an unexplained brief delay.

Datchinamurthy was arrested in 2011 and later convicted of trafficking about 45 grams (1.6 ounces) of heroin into Singapore. He was to be hanged in 2022, but won a last-minute reprieve pending a legal challenge that was dismissed by a court in August.

Surendran K.Nagarajan, a Malaysian lawyer representing his family, said the family was informed early Thursday that the execution due at dawn had been halted. But hours later, Singapore’s prison authorities reversed the decision, informing the family that the execution would proceed and asking them to collect his body in less than two hours, he said. No reason was given for the brief postponement.

Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau announced his execution in a statement, saying Datchinamurthy had been given the full legal process and that his petitions for presidential clemency were unsuccessful. It said the amount of drugs he carried could feed the addiction of about 540 people for a week.

“Capital punishment is imposed only for the most serious crimes, such as the trafficking of significant quantities of drugs which cause very serious harm, not just to individual drug abusers, but also to their families and the wider society,” according to the statement.

The lawyer, widely known as N.Surendran, condemned what he called “state barbarism.”

“This is an act of cruelty unsurpassed even in the history of Singapore’s harsh death penalty regime,” he said. “To pretend to give a reprieve to Datch, raise his hopes and his family’s hopes, and then to plunge them into horror and despair again, is unforgivable and uncivilized.”

Anti-death penalty activists held candlelight vigils in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore earlier this week to protest Datchinamurthy’s execution. He was the third Malaysian and 11th person to be executed so far this year in Singapore, up from nine executions for the whole of 2024, the activists said. More than 40 remain on death row in the city-state.

Over 30 human rights and civil society groups this week reiterated calls for Singapore to halt executions. They said three other Malaysians and a Singaporean man, who had been on death row for drug offenses ranging from 7 years to 10 years, face imminent executions after recently losing their latest appeals.

Singapore’s strict laws mandate the death penalty for anyone caught carrying more than 15 grams of heroin and 500 grams of cannabis. Critics say that Singapore’s death penalty has mostly snared low-level mules and done little to stop drug traffickers and organized syndicates. Singapore’s government defends it as necessary to protect its citizens.