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

A Malaysian man was hanged in Singapore yesterday 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 yesterday afternoon after an unexplained brief delay.

Datchinamurthy was arrested in 2011 and later convicted of trafficking about 45 grams 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 yesterday 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.