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Aug. 3 (UPI) -- Singapore executed a 39-year-old local man Thursday for heroin trafficking, the third person to be hanged for drug offenses in the city-state in a little more than a week. Former delivery driver Mohamed Shalleh Bin Abdul Latiff was hanged at Changi Prison at dawn after being sentenced to death in 2019, Singapore's Central Narcotics Bureau said in a news release.
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Shalleh was convicted of possessing 1.9 ounces of pure heroin for dealing purposes, sufficient to supply about 640 drug users for a week and four times the 0.5-ounce threshold at which Singapore imposes the death penalty.
He received full due process under the law and was represented by legal counsel throughout the process, added the CNB which justified his execution by saying drug trafficking caused "very serious harm, not only to individual drug abusers, but also to their families and the wider society."
"Capital punishment is part of Singapore's comprehensive harm prevention strategy which targets both drug demand and supply," the CNB said.
Shalleh claimed at his trial that he believed he was delivering smuggled cigarettes for a friend to settle part of a debt and did not know the packages contained heroin. In a release explaining the grounds for the decision, the high court judge who handed down the sentence ruled the defense did not rebut the presumption of knowledge of the drugs he was carrying.
Shalleh's execution follows the hanging of 45-year-old Saridewi Binte Djamani on July 28 -- the first woman to be executed in 19 years -- and Mohd Aziz bin Hussain, 57, two days earlier. Both Saridewi and Aziz had their appeals against their conviction and sentence denied. Petitions for clemency to Prime Minister Halimah Yacob were also unsuccessful.
Last week's executions and the planned execution of Shalleh drew condemnation from rights groups including Human Rights Watch, which said that the death penalty is "an inherently cruel and unusual punishment" that should be abolished.
