Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
singapore – Masoud Rahimi Mehrzad’s father was in a remote part of Iran when he received the news he had been dreading for a long time.
His son was to be hanged in Singapore’s Changi Prison.
Suffering from failing health and with just a week’s notice until his execution on the morning of November 29, he was unable to make the demanding journey to see his son in person one last time, according to reports.
Instead, the final contact between father and son came via a long-distance phone call.
Despite a last-ditch legal challenge, Masoud was hanged on the last Friday of November, more than 14 years after he was arrested for drug offences.
Masoud, 35, became the ninth person hanged in Singapore this year.
“With four executions in November alone, the Singapore government is relentlessly pursuing its cruel use of the death penalty,” said Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
Campaign groups against the death penalty believe that around 50 prisoners are currently on death row in Singapore.
Despite opposition from prominent human rights groups and United Nations experts, Singapore claims the death penalty has been “an effective deterrent” against drug traffickers and says the city-state is “one of the safest places in the world “.
A group of UN experts said in a joint statement last month that Singapore should “move away from reliance on criminal law and adopt a human rights-based approach to drug use and mental disorders drug use”.
Stories of the plight of death row inmates generally come from activists, who work tirelessly to fight for the rights of those facing the final punishment.
The recent spate of executions has now left them reeling.
“It’s a nightmare,” says Kokila Annamalai, a leading anti-death penalty activist with the Transformative Justice Collective (TJC).
His work has led him to establish a close bond with many inmates on death row.
“They are more than people for whom we are campaigning. They are also our friends, they feel like our brothers. It has been very difficult for us personally,” Annamalai told Al Jazeera.
“Losing another child, he couldn’t accept it”
Like almost all Singaporean prisoners on death row, Masoud was convicted of drug offences.
Born in Singapore to an Iranian father and a Singaporean mother, he had spent his childhood between Iran and Dubai.
At the age of 17, he returned to Singapore to complete his compulsory national service and it was during this period of his life that he was arrested on drug charges.
In May 2010, aged 20, she drove to meet a Malaysian man at a petrol station in central Singapore. Masoud took a package from the man, before leaving. He was soon arrested by the police. They searched the package and some other bags they found in the car.
In total, officers discovered more than 31 grams of diamorphine, also known as heroin, and 77 grams of methamphetamine.
Masoud was arrested for possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking.
Under Singapore’s strict laws, anyone carrying more than 15 grams of heroin can face the death penalty.
Masoud told police he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. He also blamed an illegal moneylending syndicate for planting the drug to incriminate him.
His defense did not stand up in court and he was sentenced to death in 2015.
Masoud’s sister Mahnaz published an open letter shortly before her brother was hanged last month. He described the pain the death sentence had inflicted on his father.
“My father was heartbroken and has never recovered. One of my brothers died when I was 7, of appendicitis…losing another son, he couldn’t accept it,” she wrote.
Masoud had fought tirelessly to appeal his conviction, but his numerous legal challenges failed, as did a plea for clemency to Singapore’s President Tharman Shanmugaratnam.
Before his own execution, Masoud’s sister told how her brother had spent his time on death row helping other prisoners with their own legal battles.
“He is very committed to helping them find peace,” Mahnaz said.
“He feels it is his responsibility to fight for his life, as well as the lives of others, and he wishes that all those on death row felt the same motivation, to be there for each other,” he said.
“People are starting to worry deeply”
In October, Masoud was one of 13 death row inmates who won a case against the Singapore Prison Service and the Attorney-General’s Chambers, after they were deemed to have acted illegally in disclosing and requesting the letters private of the prisoners.
The court also considered that the prisoners’ right to confidentiality had been violated.
Masoud was also to represent a group of 31 prisoners in a constitutional challenge against a new law related to the post-appeal process in death penalty cases. A hearing in that legal challenge is still scheduled for late January 2025, a date that is now too late for Masoud.
Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau said the fact that Masoud’s execution was carried out before the next high court hearing was “not relevant to his conviction or sentence”.
After a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, foreclosures have picked up in recent years in the Southeast Asian financial hub.
According to news reports, 25 prisoners have been executed in Singapore since 2022, with authorities showing little chance of softening their approach to capital punishment for drug traffickers.
Anti-death penalty activists in the city-state continue to voice their outrage at the government’s actions, using social media to amplify the personal stories of death row inmates.
However, they have started receiving “correction orders” from government authorities, which are issued under Singapore’s controversial fake news law.
Annamalai’s TJC group has come under the law – the Protection Against Online Falsification and Manipulation Act (POFMA) – for several posts related to death row cases.
The campaign group has been ordered to include a “correction notice” with its original posts and also to share an online link to a government website, for further clarification.
“It’s always the story of a prisoner facing imminent execution that gets POFMA,” Annamalai said.
Describing these individual prisoner stories as “the most powerful”, Annamalai says the group has been particularly targeted because “people start to care deeply and want to act when they read them”.
“Trying to shut us up”
Rights groups have recently come under fire from the authorities for activist groups.
“We condemn in the strongest terms the continued intimidation and climate of fear that the authorities have created around anti-death penalty activism in Singapore and demand that the harassment of activists cease immediately,” said seven anti-death penalty groups. the death penalty in a joint statement. in October
Elizabeth Wood, chief executive of the Capital Punishment Justice Project, based in Melbourne, Australia, and one of seven signatories to the letter, said those fighting to end executions were being cast as “glorifying” drug dealers.
“They announced that they would create a day of remembrance for drug victims. This is another means of accusing activists of glorifying and trying to humanize drug traffickers,” Wood said.
Human Rights Watch’s Lau said that “the Singaporean government should not use its repressive and overbroad laws to try to silence activists against the death penalty.”
Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs declined an interview request from Al Jazeera.
In a recent statement, the Home Office said they “do not target, silence and harass organizations and individuals simply for speaking out against the death penalty”.
TJC’s Annamalai said she will continue her activism despite facing a correction order from POFMA for a post on her personal Facebook page.
Although he faces the risk of a fine or even jail time, Annamalai said he will not make any corrections.
“They are aggressively and desperately trying to silence us, but they will not succeed,” he added.
