Singapore executed two convicted Malaysian heroin traffickers...

Singapore executed two convicted Malaysian heroin traffickers despite protests by human rights group Amnesty International. Authorities hanged Vignes Mourthi and Moorthy Angappan at dawn after President S.R. Nathan rejected a clemency petition. 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 in 2001 outside a local mosque, had denied the conversation took place. Angappan, a truck driver, was charged with helping him. 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.