Trafficker hangs despite appeals

Press, 22 July 1989, Page 1

Trafficker hangs despite appeals

NZPA-Reuter Kajang Malaysia hanged a British drug trafficker, Derrick Gregory, at dawn yesterday in a jail surrounded by walls covered with anti-drug slogans. Britain, which made eleventhhour appeals for clemency, immediately expressed disappointment at the execution. “The British Government had hoped that representations made at all levels to the Malaysian authorities would have succeeded. We are disappointed they have not,” said a British High Commission spokesman. Gregory, a painter, aged 42, described in court as having a serious personality disorder, was the third Westerner hanged under Malaysia’s tough anti-drug laws.

The condemned man, from Middlesex, southern England, went to the gallows at 6 a.m. (10 a.m. New Zealand time) in the maximum-security Kajang Prison on the outskirts of the capital, Kuala Lumpur; prison officials said.

A photograph of Gregory’s daughter, Tara, aged seven, was the only possession they allowed him to keep after he had requested it. Gregory clutched it throughout the night until he was marched to the gallows. He had not seen his daughter since she was an infant His wife, Carole, filed for divorce soon

after he was sentenced to death in March, 1987. The death sentence came five years after his arrest at the airport on the resort island of Penang, while trying to leave Malaysia with 576 g of heroin in his boots and underwear.

Dozens of journalists watched as a truck took his body from the jail, the walls of which are covered with anti-drug slogans in Malay and English and topped with rolls of barbed wire.

Prison guards later unloaded Gregory’s blanket-covered body on to a stretcher at a nearby mortuary.

His defence lawyer, Mr Rasiah Rajasingam, said the High Commission was making arrangements to transport the body back to Britain.

Gregory’s parents left Malaysia on Thursday after paying their last visit to their son. The whereabouts of his brother, Paul, was unknown.

Mr Rajasingam said a Malaysian pardons board rejected Gregory’s appeal for clemency last week, the last legal recourse available.

A British Government appeal to King Sultan Azlan Shah was turned down this week.

Gregory, said by a psychiatrist at the trial to have a serious personality disorder as a result of a childhood illness, testified that he was forced to smuggle the

drugs after death threats from two men he met in Penang. Malaysia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Mr Abdullah Fadzil Che Wan, was quoted by a local newspaper last Friday as saying Malaysia had notified the British Government that it had rejected the second appeal.

“We will remain firm in our decision,” he said.

Malaysia has executed more than 70 drug offenders, mostly Asians but including two Australians, since 1975 when it introduced a mandatory death penalty for possession of more than 15g of heroin or 200 g of cannabis. The widely publicised hangings of the Australians, Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers, in July, 1986, were criticised by several countries, including Australia, New Zealand and Britain, from which Malaysia gained independence in 1957. But the Government of the Prime Minister, Mr Mohamad, due to host a Commonwealth summit conference meeting in October, said it would not tolerate drug offenders of any nationality. “After Barlow and Chambers no-one really expected Malaysia to change its stand on the Gregory issue. The country has always been consistent in its stand on drugs. Mercy is very remote,” said a Western diplomat.