Singapore Hanged a Man Over 1 Kilogram of Cannabis He Did Not Touch

Singapore has hanged a man convicted of conspiring to traffic 1 kilogram of cannabis, activists confirmed on Wednesday. The execution came even after local activists and international groups voiced serious concern about the fairness of his conviction, as well as Singapore’s use of the death penalty for drug offenses.

Tangaraju Suppiah was sentenced to death in 2018 for abetting an attempt to traffic one kilogram of cannabis. The 46-year-old was hanged at dawn on Wednesday, despite a week-long public campaign by local activists and his family to halt the execution. 

He was convicted after the court ruled he was the owner of the phone number used to coordinate the delivery of the cannabis—which activists note he did not even touch.

“We definitely hit another peak of infamy today when they committed themselves to execute a person who supposedly conspired to traffic cannabis, but at no point the person has had any contact with the cannabis,” Dobby Chew, the executive coordinator of the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network, told VICE World News. 

Activists have been sounding the alarm about Tangaraju’s execution—Singapore’s first in six months—the past week. Last year, the city-state executed 11 men for drug offenses, according to the Transformative Justice Collective (TJC), a local anti-death penalty advocacy group.

“Even as the rest of the world moves away from not only the death penalty, but also towards harm reduction approaches, Singapore is stubbornly doubling down on its war on drugs,” Kirsten Han, a local journalist and activist from TJC, told VICE World News.

“This stubbornness will leave people who use drugs more vulnerable, and is also literally killing people, as we saw with Tangaraju today.”

The city-state’s use of the death penalty, especially for crimes such as drug offenses, has drawn criticism from the international community. One of Singapore’s most prominent critics is British entrepreneur Richard Branson, who founded the Business Leaders Against the Death Penalty campaign. Last year, Branson rallied against Singapore’s execution of Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, an inmate assessed to have “borderline intellectual functioning,” for drug offenses. 

On Monday, the Virgin Group founder wrote a blog post advocating against Tangaraju’s execution, saying: “Singapore may be about to kill an innocent man.”

“Killing people for allegedly smuggling cannabis is particularly cruel and misguided, given that more countries are now introducing sensible drug policy by decriminalising and regulating both medicinal and recreational cannabis,” he added. 

Last year, Thailand removed all parts of the cannabis plant from its narcotics list, ushering in a green rush as cannabis entrepreneurs attempt to capitalize on the nascent industry, despite backlash and uncertain regulations.

In a series of landmark legal reforms this month, Malaysia also removed the mandatory death penalty—including for drug trafficking—and narrowed down the number of offenses punishable by death. 

Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs rebutted Branson’s post in a statement of its own on Tuesday, which called his claim “patently untrue.”

On Tuesday, Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, similarly urged Singaporean authorities to “urgently reconsider this execution” and adopt a formal moratorium on the death penalty for drug offenses. 

Meanwhile, Phil Robertson, Deputy Asia Director of Human Rights Watch, called the execution “outrageous and unacceptable.”

It also “raises serious concerns that Singapore is launching a renewed spree to empty its death row in a misguided deterrence effort that actually reveals more about Singapore's barbarity than anything else,” he said.

Follow Koh Ewe on Twitter and Instagram.