Drug courier gets death sentence

SINGAPORE — A 49-year-old drug courier has been given the death penalty after he failed to receive a certificate of substantive assistance from the public prosecutor that would have given the High Court the option to sentence him to life imprisonment and caning.

Mohd Jeefrey Jamil, 49, is the second person — after Malaysian Devendran A/L Supramaniam, who imported 83.36g of diamorphine into Singapore and was convicted in July — to meet one requirement needed for a chance to escape the gallows but not the other, since amendments to the Misuse of Drugs Act kicked in last year.

Drug traffickers must be deemed to have been merely couriers and to have provided substantive assistance in disrupting drug-trafficking activities in order for the courts to consider the alternative sentence.

Mohd Jeefrey was convicted of trafficking no less than 45.26g of diamorphine. He was arrested on March 23, 2012, at Hamilton Road while making his fifth delivery. Ten packets of the drug were found in his haversack.

The year before, he had agreed to help someone in Malaysia deliver “packages” in return for S$3,000 or 30 packets of heroin each time.

On the day of his arrest, he had received a call and was told to go to a mosque in Marsiling to collect a plastic bag containing the bundles of drugs. He put the bundles in his haversack and returned to his rented unit in Hamilton Road.

Justice Tay Yong Kwang rejected his defence that he had not known the bundles contained a controlled drug, saying it must have been plain to any reasonable person in his position that he was being asked to be a drug courier.

Mohd Jeefrey had earlier disputed the voluntariness of the statement he had given to the police, but Justice Tay found that his oral statement had been a voluntary one that officers had fully and properly recorded. NEO CHAI CHIN