Three sentenced to hang over Aussie drug ring

Updated September 27, 2011 09:37:12

A Malaysian court has sentenced three people to death for attempting to traffick heroin to Australia.

The court in the Penang city of Georgetown sentenced two men and a woman to death by hanging.

Kwok Weng Fatt, 62, Abdul Rahman Lee Abdullah, 54, and Nurul Jannah Seng Abdullah, 47, were caught when trying to board a Malaysian Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur and Australia from the Penang international airport in January 2005.

The three were caught in a swoop on a group of Malaysian drug couriers who had swallowed packets of heroin.

Some of the others may also face the death penalty.

RSN Rayer, the lawyer for the condemned smugglers, says the trio thought they were carrying a Chinese herbal remedy banned in Australia.

"All of them have given statements which are very consistent, all three of them said they were taken to a particular hotel, they were provided tickets to fly to Australia, and they were told these were some kind of Chinese herbal medicine," he told AM.

"They pretty honestly believed that they were not doing anything wrong.

Audio: Death sentence for drug smugglers (AM)

"They never knew that they were actually going to be sentenced to death. The worst they thought they would be charged for is perhaps trying to smuggle out some kind of herbal medicine, of course which is quite contrary to what they were actually doing."

Mr Rayer says the three will appeal against the sentence.

He believes a number of other people arrested in the same swoop are likely to be sentenced in a similar way.

The lawyer said he believed more people were being sentenced to death since Tun Zaki bin Tun Azmi was appointed a Malaysia's chief justice in October 2008.

"In the last four years there has been a change, a paradigm shift I would say, where plenty of cases have been called up, cases have been heard fast, and I would say many people have been sentenced to death," he said.

"I honestly believe that many of them have certainly have not been given a proper hearing at all."

Topics: drug-offences, law-crime-and-justice, crime, courts-and-trials, prisons-and-punishment, malaysia, australia

First posted September 27, 2011 06:58:26