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Fury as China executes Briton
A British man convicted of drug smuggling was executed in China early Tuesday, despite appeals for clemency from his family, human rights groups and even Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, according to a statement released by the British Foreign Office.
A British man convicted of drug smuggling was executed in China early Tuesday, despite appeals for clemency from his family, human rights groups and even Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, according to a statement released by the British Foreign Office.
In a statement released immediately after the execution, Brown condemned it “in the strongest terms.” The mode of execution was not immediately known early Tuesday.
The British man, Akmal Shaikh, 53, was executed in the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang, where he had been convicted in 2008 of entering the country carrying a suitcase stuffed with heroin.
Human rights groups say that he was the first European to be executed in the country in more than 50 years. His case set off international protests.
The British government said that the Chinese courts had failed to consider Shaikh’s history of mental disturbance.
Britain had called on the courts to allow an independent evaluation of Shaikh’s mental state. But China’s highest court rejected a last-minute appeal from the victim’s family this week, and it allowed the execution to go ahead.
China’s state-run news media blamed the Western news media for “politicising” the execution, and it said that government officials had determined that there was insufficient evidence that Shaikh had suffered from mental health problems.
China’s drug trafficking laws are harsh, and its criminal justice system carried out about 1,700 executions last year, according to Amnesty International.
Shaikh was born in Pakistan, and he moved to Britain when he was 11. Shaikh’s family members say that he has a long history of mental problems and that he had been duped into carrying the suitcase. He left for China in 2007, they said, hoping to start a career as a pop singer.
The New York Times
