Singapore to execute man over 1kg of cannabis in first capital punishment of 2023

Tangaraju Suppiah was arrested for conspiring to traffic 1,017.9g of cannabis in 2014

Execution of Singaporean Tamil national Tangaraju Suppiah will be carried out on 26 April at Changi prison, officials say (Sourced/ The Independent)

Authorities in Singapore are set to execute a man for his involvement in trafficking 1kg cannabis which his family claims he has never even touched.

Singapore is known for its strict enforcement of laws and has faced growing calls to ban the death penalty. Scores of protesters last year had come out to demonstrate against capital punishment when the government resumed the practice after the Covid pandemic.

The execution of Singaporean Tamil national Tangaraju Suppiah, 46, will be the first instance of capital punishment carried out this year.

The Singapore Prison Service confirmed Suppiah’s execution will be carried out on 26 April at Changi prison and informed his family members on Wednesday.

Suppiah was convicted of abetting by engaging in a conspiracy to traffic 1,017.9g of cannabis in 2017 and sentenced to the death penalty in December 2018.

Suppiah was arrested in March 2014 after Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau arrested two men they believed were connected to him.

Prior to his arrest in this case, Suppiah was arrested in a separate drug consumption case and was out to report to the police for a routine urine test he had missed when he was detained by the authorities.

The court found him to be the owner of two phone numbers used by the contact drug delivery man and the prosecution had said he was one of the intended recipients of the drug parcel.

Suppiah, however, told the court he lost his phone in August 2013 and it was possible someone else may have taken his phone and contacted one of the arrested men.

With his impending execution, the family is looking to defend Suppiah and appeal against the order by the Singapore high court, but does not have legal counsel to file a petition to save him from capital punishment, The Independent has learnt.

On being read the charges against him during his conviction hearing, Suppiah had told the judge, “I do not know about this. I am not involved in this thing”.

His sister Leela met Suppiah in prison on Thursday after receiving the notification about the date of his execution.

“The family is looking for a lawyer who will defend his innocence. He still maintains his innocence and the family believes him. He is also appealing for some of the evidence that was not disclosed to him – like certain call records, statements and he wants that evidence to be disclosed to him,” said Kokila Annamalai, a senior founding member at Transformative Justice Collective in Singapore.

This will be the first execution to be carried out by Singapore’s authorities after a gap of six months. In 2022, authorities had carried out 11 capital punishments.

The latest execution order has also sparked calls for halting the sentence.

“The authorities must immediately halt the impending execution of Tangaraju s/o Suppiah. Executions violate the right to life and are the ultimate cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment. They must never be imposed for drug offences under international law,” said the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in Asia and the Pacific.

The commission “is also troubled that Tangaraju had no lawyer representing him in his application to the Court of Appeal to review his sentence”, it said and added that the “right to effective legal representation applies to all stages of criminal proceedings, including late-stage applications”.

Singapore is among the few South Asia nations to have a stringent anti-drug trafficking law with sentencing that includes capital punishment despite international outcry for the country to overturn its harsh policies.