A perverse thought...
The fact that Singapore executed Australian Nguyen Tuong Van, a convicted drug smuggler, is no news to anyone these days. Australia tried several legal maneuverings to get him out (extradition, governmental appeals, warnings of "economic" reprisals, etc...) but the execution went ahead on schedule.
His brother Nguyen Tuong Khoa had gotten into quite a bit of debt, had started using Heroin and was generally spiraling out of control... Khoa was involved in a brutal sword attack and received a three-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty. Khoa's heroin use and debt got deeper and deeper until Van found a possible out for his brother.
The Australian Age
has the story:
As it turns out, a Chinese man in Melbourne named Tan had offered a solution.
Van would later tell Singapore narcotics police that on Tan's instructions he had met a Vietnamese man in Sydney called Sun who enlisted him to bring a "package" - that he suspected was drugs - from Cambodia via Singapore to Australia.
My perverse thought is that he did not have to go through Singapore.
I checked with Quantas (Australia's major airline) and although they do not have direct service to Cambodia, they do to several cities in Thailand and Van visited Thailand on this trip. He did not have to fly through Singapore.
What if the people to whom Khoa owed money had decided to make an example and tipped the Singapore police off to Van's cargo. Singapore has a nasty reputation for having draconian laws.
Wired Magazine has an excellent writeup by William Gibson:
Disneyland with the Death Penalty
Posted by DaveH at December 3, 2005 5:07 PM