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By Mihar Dias, October 2025
Two Malaysians, two weeks apart, executed on the same island. Both met their end in Singapore, both for trafficking heroin. Both must have known the risk. Yet both took it. And both ended up with the same final chapter — a notice of execution, extended prison visits, a lawyer’s appeal, a public protest, and finally, silence.
This isn’t a question of whether the death penalty is right or wrong. That debate has been exhausted for decades.
What we need to ask instead is: why do Malaysians keep taking the same fatal gamble when the outcome is so clear?
Singapore’s laws are not a mystery. The warnings are written in bold letters at every border checkpoint: Death for Drug Traffickers.
Unlike most governments, Singapore means every word of it. There are no second chances, no long moratoriums, no political reprieves.
Yet, year after year, Malaysians continue to risk their lives smuggling narcotics into a country that has made an industry out of certainty and consequence.
P. Pannir Selvam, convicted of carrying 51.84g of heroin, will be hanged on October 8. Barely two weeks ago, another Malaysian, K. Datchinamurthy, met the same fate for smuggling 44.96g of the same drug. https://newswav.com/A2510_uKue1v?s=A_ZPjlohF&language=en
The quantities are not small mistakes; these are deliberate acts, driven by desperation, greed, or blind faith in luck.
Whatever the reason, the result is the same: the gallows at Changi never rest.
We often frame these stories as tragedies — and they are — but they are also warnings unheeded. If capital punishment is meant to be a deterrent, then clearly, it isn’t working.
Malaysians keep ending up on death row despite decades of public executions and headline warnings. So what is it about this grim ritual that fails to register?
Perhaps it is the illusion of invincibility — the belief that “I won’t be caught.” Or perhaps it’s poverty and circumstance — the promise of quick money for a life otherwise weighed down by struggle.
Yet even in poverty, one must ask: how can ignorance survive in a world where every travel advisory, every news bulletin, every border sign screams “death”?
Singapore’s gallows have claimed many Malaysians before Pannir and Datchinamurthy.
Some were couriers, some addicts, some convinced they were just “helping a friend.” Their names fade quickly, replaced by the next one. Each time, there’s outrage, appeals, and then, resignation. Nothing changes.
So maybe the absurdity is not just in the hangings, but in the human condition that keeps feeding the noose — the same misplaced confidence, the same tragic calculus of risk versus reward.
Singapore won’t change its laws. The rope will not loosen. The only thing that can change is the mindset of those who still think they can outsmart a system designed precisely to catch them.
In the end, these executions are not political statements. They are grim punctuation marks in a story we Malaysians keep rewriting, knowing full well how it ends.
But the most sobering question we must ask ourselves is not whether the punishment fits the crime — but why so many still choose to commit it, when the price has been spelled out so plainly, so many times before.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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