Singapore Law Watch
This is the first judicial execution for murder in the Republic since 2019.
A man who strangled his former fiancee in a budget hotel in Geylang in 2018 was hanged on Feb 28.
The Singapore Police Force (SPF) said the capital sentence was carried out on Bangladeshi national Ahmed Salim, 35, who had petitioned the president for clemency but was unsuccessful.
This is the first judicial execution for murder in the Republic since 2019, a Singapore Prison Service (SPS) spokesman told The Straits Times on Feb 28, in response to queries. He added that it is the first execution in 2024.
Ahmed, a painter, had strangled Indonesian domestic worker Nurhidayati Wartono Surata in a room at the Golden Dragon Hotel on the evening of Dec 30, 2018, after she refused to leave another man she was seeing.
Ahmed was charged with murder on Jan 2, 2019, and sentenced to death on Dec 14, 2020.
An appeal against his conviction was dismissed on Jan 19, 2022.
SPF said Ahmed was accorded full due process under the law, and had access to legal counsel throughout the process.
According to statistics from SPS, the previous time a person was hanged for murder was in 2019, when there were two such judicial executions. There were four executions that year.
There were no judicial executions in 2020 and 2021, and SPS has previously said this was not due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
It said an execution is scheduled only after legal processes relevant to an inmate’s death sentence and legal applications taken out on his behalf, or which could affect him, are resolved.
In recent years, there have been multiple cases of murder charges being reduced to culpable homicide not amounting to murder.
These included the case of a teenager who slashed a fellow student to death at River Valley High School in 2021. He was sentenced to 16 years’ jail in December 2023.
In another case, Xavier Yap Jung Houn was sentenced to 14 years’ jail in August 2023 after strangling his 11-year-old twins at a covered canal in Greenridge Crescent in 2022.
During Ahmed’s court proceedings, it was revealed that he and Ms Nurhidayati had started a relationship in May 2012 after a chance encounter. They agreed to get married in December 2018, with Ahmed putting a ring on her finger at a party in 2017.
But she had an affair with a Bangladeshi plumber, Mr Shamin Shamizur Rahman, in mid-2018.
Ahmed confronted her after suspecting that she was cheating on him, and she admitted to dating another man.
Ahmed then asked his mother to help him look for a wife. She found one and arrangements were made for his wedding to take place in February 2019.
But a few months later, Ahmed and Ms Nurhidayati reconciled.
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