First woman to be hanged in Singapore in nearly 20 years, a citizen of Singapore, age 45, was executed on Friday for drug trafficking, according to officials.
“The capital sentence of death imposed on Saridewi Binte Djamani was carried out on 28 July 2023,” the Central Narcotics Bureau said in a statement.
She was found guilty of distributing “not less than 30.72 grams” of heroin, more than twice the amount that would have resulted in the death penalty in Singapore.
Djamani, who received a sentence in 2018, “was accorded full due process under the law, and was represented by legal counsel throughout the process,” the bureau stated in a statement.
“She appealed against her conviction and sentence, and the Court of Appeal dismissed her appeal on 6 October 2022,” the bureau said, adding that her plea for presidential clemency was also rejected.
According to the bureau, Djamani is the first woman to be put to death in the city-state since 2004.
She is the fifteenth prisoner to have been executed since the government started carrying them out again in March 2022 following a two-year hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mohd Aziz bin Hussain, a 57-year-old local man, was hanged on Wednesday for smuggling roughly 50 grams of heroin.
The trafficking of more than 500 grams of cannabis or more than 15 grams of heroin can result in the death penalty in Singapore, which has some of the strictest anti-drug laws in the world.
Amnesty International and other rights organizations had pleaded with the government to put an end to the executions this week, claiming there was no proof the death sentence served as a deterrence to crime.
According to Amnesty International, Singapore is one of four nations—along with China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia—that executed detainees for drug-related charges in 2017. The other three are China and Iran.
Singapore claims that having the death penalty has made it one of the safest nations in Asia.
