Dawn call brings message of hanging

Press, 8 July 1986, Page 10

Dawn call brings message of hanging

NZPA-AAP Kuala Lumpur A call to prayer for the Islamic faithful was a call to the gallows for Kevin Barlow and Geoff Chambers.

Its source unseen, the mullah’s cry rang rich and haunting over Pudu prison, in central Kuala Lumpur, for several minutes just before 6 a.m. (Malaysian time).

This regular part of the city’s daily life coincided with the time the two Australians were probably taken from their death row cells, handcuffed behind their backs and marched to a death barely a minute away. Outside the jail, the large band of Australian journalists, cameramen and photographers knew without being told that their countrymen’s lives ended with that call.

It was a poignant reminder of the cultural gap which meant they died for a crime which would have resulted in a jail term now half-over if they had- been convicted in Australia.

Hangings are hardly a novelty in Malaysia with 36 Aslans having gone to the gallows since 1975 for drug offences alone.

The fact that the Australians and Britons were

outnumbered by local news media, and the crowd was boosted to more than 200 in the predawn gloom by curious locals, suggested this one was different

The crowd began to build about 4 a.m. as the appointed hour for the first two non-Asians to go to Malaysia’s gallows approached.

The death-watch manner of the locals and foreigners made it clear each group was there for starkly different reasons.

The Australians and Britons shuffled around, conversation muted at best and mostly monosyllabic, pre-occupied with distaste at a story they would never have to write at home.

The locals, by contrast, chatted amiably if a little subdued in a multitude of tongues. A group of ethnic Chinese girls giggled in one corner, on the road news media cars and taxidrivers argued with the police about the traffic problems their imaginative parking managed to cause even at that hour.

Any sound from the prison, where death row is said to emit a cacophony of encouragement to those about to die on hanging nights, was

drowned by the buzz of the crowd and the traffic.

A solitary light shone from a window at the upper end of a cell block. A Malaysian journalist said the block was death row and the light came from the hangman’s room.

The first buzz of activity came when Barlow’s lawyer, Karpal Singh, arrived at 5.30 a.m. to try to find out the fate of the men. No, he was not allowed to watch executions and nor would he want to.

A knock at the peephole 10 minutes later told him the executions were about 20 minutes away and he would be allowed In at 6.40 a.m.

The gates were opened to allow two cars through. One, locals said, contained the doctor who had to certify the deaths and another contained a statutory witness, the prison superintendant, Peter Rogers.

Mr Karpal waited at the iron door, hemmed in by news crews. Red-eyed and strained, the normally-elo-quent Penang politician could find few words to say.

The fateful hour passed and prison guards began forcing their way through the crowd to begin another day of life on the

inside. As dawn belatedly began to break through an overcast tropical sky at 6.50 a.m. the police cleared the crush to allow a large prison truck out, its canvas load cover wellsecured. A few minutes later Mr Karpal’s repeated knocking was finally answered through a peephole. He translated the Malay message: “The bodies are in the back of the truck.” But that was not the end of the death-watch. It merely transferred itself to the General Hospital mortuary 2.5 km away to await collection by the families’ representatives. While only a handful of news media waited, 300 Malaysians built up as the morning wore on to underline the significance of the death penalty crossing the last racial frontier in Malaysia. Mary Shalet had come from a nearby office. “It’s a real holiday crowd. This case has had a lot of publicity and people have turned out to see it” She said it was sad that two young men had died and she felt sorry for the mothers.

But her co-worker, who gave his name as Salva, added: "It will be a deterrent”