Singapore executes Malaysian traffickers despite appeal

Adds execution of second trafficker

SINGAPORE, - Singapore executed two convicted Malaysian heroin traffickers on Friday despite protests by human rights group Amnesty International and after the High Court dismissed their appeal for a retrial.

Authorities hanged Vignes Mourthi and Moorthy Angappan at dawn after President S.R. Nathan rejected a clemency petition, bringing Singapore's total executions this year to 12.

Amnesty had urged a retrial for 23-year-old Mourthi and said the former machine operator had not received a fair hearing because his conviction appeared based on a hand-written transcript of a conversation he had with an undercover officer.

Mourthi, arrested for selling heroin for S$8,000 ($4,622) to an undercover policeman two years ago outside a local mosque, had denied the conversation took place. Angappan, a truck driver, was charged with helping him.

Singapore has one of the highest per capita execution rates in the world despite a relatively low crime in its resident population of just over four million.

In an interview with British Broadcasting Corp this week, Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said up to 80 people had been executed in the first nine months of this year but stressed the figure needed to be checked.

The government later clarified that 10 people had been executed this year, compared to 28 in 2002 and 27 in 2001.

Mourthi's lawyer, M. Ravi, had threatened to take the case to the United Nations and had written to Singapore's president asking that the constitutional court be convened to look into the legality of the death sentence.

In Singapore, anyone over the age of 18 found guilty of trafficking drugs such as heroin, morphine or cocaine faces a mandatory death sentence.

According to Amnesty, Singapore hanged 340 people between 1991 and 2000, and 247 were executed for trafficking drugs.