MACAO, Aug. 7 -- The president of Portugal will seek clemency for a Macao-born Hong Kong woman sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Singapore, Portuguese media said Sunday. News reports reaching the Portugese enclave of Macao said President Mario Soares had conferred with other officials in Portugal and soon would send a letter to Singapore seeking clemency for Angel Mou Pui- peng.
Mou, 25, has been on death row in Singapore after being convicted three years ago of drug trafficking, a capital offense. She was caught at Singapore's Changi airport with 12.3 pounds of heroin in her luggage Aug. 29, 1991. The official Portuguese news agency, LUSA, and government-run TDM television in Macao said Soares had drafted a clemency appeal, which will be forwarded 'soon' to the president of Singapore. Mou was born in Macao, an overseas territory of Portugal that reverts to Chinese rule in 1999. Her family moved to nearby Hong Kong several years after her birth. Her Portuguese passport was issued by Portugal's consulate-general in the British colony, officials confirmed. 'The president intends to invoke humanitarian reasons to ask for the Macao citizen's (death) penalty to be commuted in order to save her life,' LUSA quoted official sources in Lisbon as saying. Mou's case created widespread public interest in Hong Kong and Macao after her sister, who also allegedly was involved in heroin smuggling, said both women believed their contraband was expensive watches rather than drugs. Portuguese sources have argued Mou, an unmarried mother at 16, was a prostitute whose Chinese 'boyfriend' gave the two women the drugs to carry to Europe, not telling them what was in the false bottoms of their suitcases.
