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SINGAPORE UPHOLDS DEATH SENTENCE FOR AUSTRALIAN

SINGAPORE - A Singapore court upheld on Wednesday the death sentence for a 24-year-old Australian man of Vietnamese origin found guilty of smuggling 400 grammes of heroin while in transit at the island's main airport. 

Nguyen Tuong Van, arrested at Changi airport in December 2002 while travelling from Cambodia to Melbourne, will be hanged unless his lawyers and rights group Amnesty International win a bid for clemency from Singapore President S.R.  Nathan. 

If the petition fails, Van will be the first Australian citizen executed in Singapore. 

Wearing loose orange prison overalls, with his hands shackled, Van showed little emotion as a Court of Appeal judge read the verdict to a courtroom that included Australia's High Commissioner and Van's mother, who wept after the sentence. 

A day after London-based Amnesty challenged Singapore to disclose the total number of executions this year, the government revealed for the first time that 6 people had been hanged between January and September and 19 for the whole of 2003. 

Australian envoy Gary Quinlan said on Wednesday Canberra was urging Nathan to commute Van's sentence to a prison term. 

"We will be supporting any clemency based on the very specific compassionate and humanitarian circumstances which surround this case," he told reporters after the verdict. 

In 1994, Singapore caused a diplomatic furore when it turned down Dutch government pleas for clemency and hanged 59-year-old Dutchman Johannes Van Damme for trafficking about 4.5 kg of heroin. 

Singapore's drug laws are among the world's harshest.  Anyone aged 18 or over convicted of carrying more than 15 grammes of heroin faces mandatory execution by hanging. 

Van, a former salesman, told a narcotics officer soon after his arrest that he had carried the drugs on behalf of a Sydney-based drugs syndicate in a desperate bid to pay off legal fees owed by his twin brother. 

A policewoman discovered a package of heroin taped to his back during a pre-flight security check, and another in his hand luggage. 

About 400 people have been hanged in Singapore since 1991, mostly for drug trafficking, giving the wealthy city-state of 4.2 million people possibly the highest execution rate in the world relative to its population, Amnesty International says.  Amnesty says only 6 people sentenced to death in Singapore have been spared execution. 

Singapore staunchly defends its use of the death penalty and insists that foreigners are not to be exempted from its execution laws. 

Van's lawyers had appealed the original death sentence announced in March by questioning the way police had handled the drugs and disputing the legality of the death penalty, which Singapore introduced in 1975 as mandatory for drug traffickers and murderers.