Two Pakistani men face the gallows in Singapore after a court Friday found them guilty of murdering a compatriot over a gambling dispute and dismembering the body.
Street-side
tissue sellers Rasheed Muhammad, 45, and Ramzan Rizwan, 28, were convicted of
smothering fellow Pakistani Muhammad Noor to death in their lodging house in
2014, before hacking up the body with saws.
The 59-year-old
victim’s torso and lower limbs were found stuffed in two separate luggage bags
in the city-state.
Murder convictions in Singapore are punishable by death and carried out by hanging.
“As the photographs and evidence of the discarded limbs and torso show,
both Rasheed and Ramzan acted in concert after the murder as they did before
and during it,” High Court Judge Choo Han Teck said in his judgement.
Rasheed and
Ramzan arrived in Singapore in May 2014, and sold packets of tissue paper for a
living.
The dispute
started after the pair sought to retrieve Sg$1,100 ($776) Ramzan had lost to
the victim in a card game.
After using a
shirt to smother the victim, the two men purchased saws to dismember the body.
A bag with the
torso was found by an 81-year-old man and Rasheed subsequently led police to a
second bag containing the legs, court documents showed.
Defence lawyers
for the pair had argued that they did not intend to commit murder, and both
blamed each other for the death.
Rasheed, a
father of eight, and Ramzan, a father of three, will appeal the conviction,
their lawyers told AFP.
Earlier this
month, Singapore’s highest court upheld the death sentence of a former
Singapore policeman for double murder.
Singapore
executed four people in 2015, one for murder and three for drug offences, according
to prison statistics.
Rights groups
have called on Singapore to abolish capital punishment, which was carried over
from British colonial rule, but the government argues that it is a deterrent to
crime.
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