Drug lords’ Singapore links resurface as executions threaten to gain pace at Changi Prison

A well-documented nexus involving some of the biggest drug lords in the region doing business in Singapore has resurfaced on the back of the city-state’s continued defiance of international criticism over a series of scheduled executions of “small-time” mules convicted over the past decade.

In 2005, opposition politician Chee Soon Juan accused the Singapore leadership of hypocrisy in defending its death penalty for drug trafficking, citing its huge investments in Myanmar despite multiple indictments of drug lords with links to the military junta there.

“This government keeps going on about having to take a tough stance on drugs and what a scourge illicit drugs are in our society. Fine, but go and get it at its source,” Chee, a former political prisoner who had been sued by the late Lee Kuan Yew and his son, the current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, told Australia’s The Age newspaper then.

“What’s the point of getting the mules? You know these drug lords are just going to find new people to get the drugs.”

This is a view at the heart of international protest over Singapore’s recent attempts to hang those convicted of drug trafficking, most of whom said they were forced to become involved in the illicit trade by drug lords.

“What’s the point of getting the mules? You know these drug lords are just going to find new people to get the drugs.”

Critics have pointed out that many of those awaiting execution in Singapore’s Changi Prison are drug mules from poor families whom they say often end up in the execution chambers while the drug kingpins who employed them go unpunished.

Stressing this point, British aviation magnate Richard Branson recently wrote an open letter to Singapore President Halimah Yacob to stop the execution of Nagaenthran K Dharmalingam, a Malaysian diagnosed with mental disabilities.

Branson, like many others, said statistics showed that the death penalty for drug crimes had failed to deter the offences, adding that even extreme measures such as those taken by President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines could not end the illicit trade.

“Yet, the global drug trade continues to grow, and illicit drugs of all types are more readily available around the world than at any other point in history.

“If deterrence is the objective, these laws have failed miserably. And they will continue to fail,” Branson wrote.

Singaporean independent journalist Kirsten Han, who has been actively highlighting the stories behind those condemned to death for drug offences, said they were only victims of circumstances who turned into drug mules.

“One popular depiction of a drug trafficker deserving of capital punishment is the greedy peddler of death, tempting people into wrecked lifetimes of addiction for the sake of turning a hefty profit,” Han wrote in “We, The Citizens”, an online newsletter she founded which highlights topics deemed sensitive by the PAP regime, and which are unlikely to be carried by Singapore’s tightly controlled mainstream media.

“I’ve not yet come across a case on death row that fit this description. As far as I’ve seen, there are no power- and money-hungry drug lords on death row.”

The nexus of drug kingpins

More than a decade ago, Swedish journalist Bertil Linter documented how Singapore had been doing business with individuals and companies in Myanmar with links to drug kingpins.

They included the family of the late “heroin king” Lo Hsing Han, which owns Asia World Co Ltd, a major infrastructure conglomerate in Myanmar with which the Singapore government had a joint venture at a time when the Burmese junta was condemned for its human rights crimes.

In 2008, Lo, alongside his son Steven Law and Singaporean wife Cecilia Ng, were added to a blacklist maintained by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), saying they were financially tied to the Burmese regime with “a history of involvement in illicit activities”.

According to a US treasury file on them, Ng was running at least 10 companies in Singapore.

Later that same year, OFAC named dozens of individuals and companies as “Specially Designated Narcotics Traffickers”, linking them to a network of drug trafficking in Southeast Asia and key exporters of drugs such as methamphetamine, the same drug found on many convicts who have either been executed or are awaiting their execution date after exhausting all appeals.

Of the 26 individuals named by OFAC, one of them, Chou Hsien Cheng, is a Singapore citizen.

A recent check by journalist Han revealed that Chou is linked to two companies, Tet Kham (S) Pte Ltd and Vest Spectrum (S) Pte Ltd, neither of which is believed to still be in existence.

Han however could not establish Chou’s whereabouts or what had become of him.

“It sure doesn’t seem like he’s on death row,” she wrote recently.

“To be clear: I’m not saying that he should be put to death, since I don’t think the death penalty should exist at all, but our ‘zero tolerance’ drug policies don’t make sense if we’re only putting poor ethnic minorities, carrying relatively modest amounts of drugs, to death,” she added.

Ethnic disproportion and crowded death row

In her latest post, Han, who alongside prominent rights lawyer M Ravi has been actively engaging with the families of death row prisoners, said many of them now feared that executions “might be restarted with a vengeance”.

She said about 20 out of 50 death row prisoners now face imminent execution after having exhausted all avenues to avoid the gallows.

“For years, I have heard whispers of a backlog building up. People are now terrified that the prison will pick up the pace of hangings because death row is getting, as families relay to me, ‘too full’,” she said.

Just last week, two death row prisoners, Singaporean Roslan Bakar and Malaysian Pausi Jefridin, who had been scheduled for execution on Feb 16 – more than a decade after they were sentenced to death – were allowed to remain alive through eleventh-hour legal interventions by their lawyers Ravi, Violet Netto and Charles Yeo.

A presidential respite was issued to stay their executions amid an ongoing legal battle.

The duo’s plight is similar to a series of other planned executions in the last few months, such as those of Nagaenthran and fellow Malaysian, Pannir Selvam Pranthaman, and Singaporeans Syed Suhail Syed Zin and Moad Fadzir Mustaffa, all of whom are fighting to stay alive by making full use of their limited space to legal process in the country.

Han also highlighted the fact that an overwhelming majority of those awaiting their day in the execution room share similar economic and ethnic backgrounds, namely Malays and Indians.

In September 2020, MalaysiaNow reported that some 90% of Singapore’s death row prisoners were from these two ethnic communities, who comprise just over 20% of the population.

“Between 2010 and 2021, out of the 77 people sentenced to death (and who had their appeals dismissed), 50 of them were Malay. Many of the prisoners whose cases I have come across have also struggled with poverty, access to education and opportunities, histories of abuse or neglect, drug dependency, or intellectual or psychosocial disabilities,” Han said.