KUALA LUMPUR – Wisma Putra will continue to monitor developments in the death penalty case involving Malaysian man Nagaenthran Dhamalingam.
The Foreign Affairs Ministry will also provide consular aid to him and his family, said Foreign Affairs Minister Datuk Seri Saifuddin Abdullah in a statement today.
He added that he wrote to his Singaporean peer on the matter, and has received a letter from the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network via Petaling Jaya MP Maria Chin Abdullah.
The letter highlighted the case and urged Wisma Putra to bring the matter up with the Singaporean government.
Nagaenthran was arrested in Singapore on April 22, 2010 for trafficking 42.72g of diamorphine and was handed the death penalty by the high court on November 22, 2010.
He has exhausted his appeal options after his presidential clemency application was rejected on June 1, 2020.
Nagaenthran has been scheduled to be executed eight days from now on November 10.
Malaysians are on a mission to save the 33-year-old from the gallows.
The petition on change.org has garnered almost 32,000 at the time of writing.
The petition seeks for Singapore President Halimah Yacob to pardon Nagaenthran for the commission of a non-violent crime.
While standing trial in Singapore for drug trafficking, Nagaenthran told the court that he was coerced to perform the illegal act by a man who assaulted him and threatened to murder his girlfriend.
It is learnt that Nagaenthran only has an IQ of 69 and suffers from impaired executive functioning and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Despite psychiatrist Dr Ung Eng Khean’s submission that Nagaenthran suffers from an “abnormality of the mind” during his arrest, the death sentence was imposed on him.
According to his appeal summary as delivered by Singapore chief justice Sundaresh Menon, Nagaethran was detained while entering Singapore from Malaysia in 2009 when he was only 21 years old.
Upon his detention, Nagaenthran was found to have diamorphine strapped to his thigh, which he said was placed there by a friend he only knew as “King”.
On appeal, because he provided different and irreconcilable accounts of why he committed the offence, the court had no reason to doubt the veracity of his initial statement upon arrest.
Thus, the court held that Nagaenthran’s mental responsibility for the offence could not have been substantially impaired because he understood the nature of his act as well as its illegal nature.
“In the court’s judgment, the appellant took a calculated risk, which contrary to his expectations, materialised.
“In the circumstances, even if his ability to assess the risk was impaired, on no basis could this amount to an impairment of his mental responsibility for his acts,” the case summary read. – The Vibes, November 3, 2021
