The British Foreign Office in London issued a statement to the press, adding that the British government had considered the case and had decided not to submit a plea for clemency. The Straits Times also revealed that while on death row, Martin had turned down a request from Scotland Yard to interview him. British police believe that he was linked to the disappearance of management consultant Timothy McDowell, 28, who went missing while holidaying in Belize in Central America. They suspected that McDowell was possibly murdered and his body, which was never found, dumped into a crocodile-infested river by Martin. They found a substantial amount of money transferred from McDowell's bank account to Martin's account in Britain after his arrest in Singapore. This sum of money was later moved to another account, also under Martin's name, in the US. It was reported that Martin spent his last days writing garbled love poems to his former Mexican wife - described as the one true love of his life - from his 8ft-by-6ft windowless cell, lit 24 hours with a camera monitoring him permanently. His mother and sister, Janet, returned to Singapore to say goodbye to him 12 hours before his execution. Under Singaporean law they were not allowed to be present at the hanging. Janet said: 'How do you say goodbye to your own brother like that? We didn't actually say the word. I just couldn't'. He told hangman, Darshan Singh that for last meal, he would like a pizza and a cup of hot chocolate.
Martin declined a request conveyed by Darshan Singh to donate his organs which would mean his own body would be dissected. Perhaps he could not bear the thought of being carved up the same way he dissected his victims? He was awoken by guards at 3.30 a.m. and escorted to a waiting room where he and the other two prisoners - two Singaporean drug traffickers - were being prepared to be executed. He was allowed to speak to a priest and a prison chaplain before the execution. After being left to hang until he was deemed officially dead he was taken down and later released to his family. At about 10.30 a.m., Martin's body, wrapped in a white sheet, was taken in an undertaker's van for cremation. His ashes were taken back to Britain by his mother and sister. Martin left a final, rambling note which read: 'One day poor, one day rich. Money fills the pain of hunger but what will fill the emptiness inside? I know that love is beyond me. So do I give myself to God, the God that has betrayed me. You may take my life for what it is worth but grant those I love peace and happiness. Can I be a person again? Only time will tell me'.
One of the stories he wrote on death row graphically described a fantasy suicide hanging, but the hanging of which he dreamt was very different from the cold meticulous execution he experienced. In his fantasies he contemplated suicide at the end of a rope but he survived. He wrote, 'I tied the rope around my little neck before I got up on the old creaky chair. I reached down and picked up a handful of earth and put in my mouth. Then I crawled up to the old creaky chair and pulled the rope tighter and tighter still. I was tiptoe, just one more pull, then my feet left the chair knocking it over and darkness embraced me as the heavens opened. I woke up in darkness and felt a heavy weight on my chest. I cried out 'Mummy, I am here".
His former wife, Mexican, Maria Arellanos, learnt for the first time that the death sentence had been carried out on the Friday he was executed. She had married Martin at 16 and separated in 1988 but they remained emotionally attached. She told an unnamed reporter: 'I knew this would happen to John but I didn't know it would hurt so much. The last memory I have of him is a message he sent promising we would meet in the next life and that he would never let me go again'. She said Martin was a deeply religious man who had become a devotee of the Virgin of Guadaloupe, Mexico's patron saint. Although their relationship ended in recrimination over his criminal ways and his womanising he was never violent towards her and she remained in love with him.
A commentator said shortly after Martin was hanged:
One wonders whether Scripps [Martin] actually wanted to die for his crimes - few other countries nowadays would have obliged him in this relatively short timescale. It was clear from his own evidence that he knew the penalty for murder in Singapore. One wonders why he chose to commit one of the murders there and then return a few days later. I am less surprised that he withdrew his appeal and decided not to ask for clemency - he knew that he would lose and that he would just be delaying the inevitable and living in miserable conditions on death row for many years to come. It is also interesting to note that the British government declined to get involved in Scripp's case - possibly they felt that Singapore had done the rest of the world a favour. They are normally resolutely anti-death penalty. But what made a non-violent criminal suddenly turn into a serial killer? A question we will never know the answer now but still a very interesting question none the less. Unusually for a serial killer there appears to be no sexual motive behind the murders but merely greed and perhaps an enjoyment of killing.
But despite his life of depravity abolitionists will always say that Martin should never have been hanged. Here is Tim Parritt of Amnesty International, for example, speaking in general terms: "Ihe death penalty is an inherently unjust and arbitrary punishment, however heinous the crime for which it is provided'.
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Singapore's Golden Triangle
While Singapore regularly and mercilessly hangs pitiful drug mules and minor traffickers like Angel Mou Pui-Peng, Amara Tochi, Yen May Woen, Vignes Mourthi and Shanmugam Murugesu it has been one of the strongest backers of Burma - officially known as Myanmar - and the worlds second biggest producer and supplier of heroin. Most of the heroin trafficked into or through Singapore's shipping channels comes from its vast poppy fields. Despite the pariah status of the country as being continuously in breach of human rights and the engine room of the notorious opium 'Golden Triangle', Singapore has long been one of its key trading partners. In the 10 months to October 2005, Singapore - Myanmar's second biggest source of imports - shipped more than $650 million worth of goods to the country. By comparison, Australia's exports to Burma in 2004 were valued at $27 million or 0.01 per cent of total exports. And for more than a decade, the Singapore government has shrugged off evidence and international protests that some of its business backing has gone directly to drug kingpins, specifically the infamous heroin trafficker Lo Hsing Han. A substantial portion of Burma's heroin also finds its way directly to Australia. The Australian Institute of Criminology long ago cited the country as the chief source of Australia's supply of the drug.
As far back as 1997, a former US Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Robert Gelbard, said: 'Since 1988 over half of the US$1 billion investments from Singapore have been tied to the family of narco- trafficker Lo Hsing Han'. Yet more than 20 years later, in September
2009, the US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, said Burma had 'failed demonstrably' to meet its counter narcotics obligations. Now in his eighties Lo reportedly started out as an opium-trafficking insurgent against the Burmese government in the 1950s. He spent time on death row in Rangoon, Burma's old capital, in the 1970s for treason before he bought his liberty and expanded his business into what was described as the most heavily armed and biggest heroin operation in Southeast Asia. In 1992, Lo founded one of Myanmar's largest conglomerates, the Asia World Company, which allegedly acts as an upmarket front and money launderer for the drug operation. It is believed he still rules as 'godfather' over a clan of traffickers in his country.
Lo's American-educated son, Tun Myint Naing, also known as Steven Law, who is married to a Singaporean woman, Cecilia Ng, is managing director of Asia World and runs three 'overseas branches' of the conglomerate from Singapore. But while Law may live the high life during his regular trips to his second home, he has been repeatedly declined a US visa due to his suspected links to the drug trade. In February 2008, the US government added more names to the targeted sanctions list of the Burmese junta's business cronies, including one of the country's richest businessmen long suspected of being involved in the drug trade. The then US President Gorge W. Bush called on the junta t
o begin a genuine dialogue with opposition and ethnic minority groups. 'As one element of our policy to promote a genuine democratic transition, the US maintains targeted sanctions that focus on the assets of regime members and their cronies who grow rich while Myanmar's people suffer under their misrule', he said in the statement. Among the businessmen were Lo, his son Steven and Cecilia, who were included on the list along with their ten companies based in Singapore; four companies they control are based in Myanmar. "The Department of the Treasury has applied financial sanctions against Steven Law, a regime crony also suspected of drug trafficking activities, and his financial network', said a White House statement. 'Today's actions add to the 33 individuals and 11 entities previously designated for sanctions'. Stuart Levy, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement, 'Unless the ruling junta in Burma halts the violent oppression of its people, we will continue to target those like Steven Law who sustain it and who profit corruptly because of that support'.
Law's companies, Asia World Co Ltd, Asia World Port Management, Asia World Industries Ltd, and Asia World Light Ltd as well as Golden Aaron Pte Ltd, and another nine companies in Singapore managed by Cecilia Ng, were named in the sanctions. Golden Aaron Ltd is associated with a production sharing contract between Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise and a business group including the China National Offshore Oil Company Myanmar Ltd (CNOOC) to carry out oil and gas exploration in the Kyaunphyu Region of Arakan State. At the time of the Bush statement, an official of Asia World Co Ltd said Law and other executives were in Naypyidaw for a meeting.
Aung Din, the director of the US Campaign for Burma, said the junta continues human rights violations with the support of leading businessmen. "The cronies also monopolise the country's economy by using their connections with the ruling generals', he told The Irrawaddy, an online magazine based in Bangkok. 'One of the significant steps for political reform is sustained pressure from the international community. The language which the repressive regime understands is international pressure'. As for Australia, it appears that the Immigration Department has granted him the privilege of a visa whenever it is requested although, unlike the US, it says it cannot comment on whether Lo or Law has even applied for one on the grounds that this is a 'privacy' matter concerning these two individuals. After the 2007 crackdown, Australia was urged to blacklist Burma's State Oil and Gas Agency, one of the ruling junta's main business vehicle but has avoided being placed under Australian government sanctions, said Burma Campaign Australia. The appeal came from a human rights campaign group. 'Not only is Burma's oil and gas industry providing the regime with the financial resources to brutally oppress the population, it is also linked to human rights abuses', said the BMA in a statement released in December 2009. Australia has an embassy in Rangoon, where two Australian federal police officers are stationed to gather intelligence on drug trafficking activities.
Burma has long received support from the 'father' of Singapore, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who appointed himself 'Minister Mentor' - a new title to ensure he remains in control for as long as he lives and perhaps from the grave as he once ominously promised in a speech. Lee is on record as a defender of the Burmese military
as the 'only instrument of government' in the country Although the detained democracy campaigner and Nobel peace prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, was promised release from house arrest before the end of 2010, Lee has long said that she should stay 'behind the fence and be a symbol'. Lee also said she might not be able to rule her country without the power the military commanded. U Lwin, the secretary of her party, the National League for Democracy, said the Singapore government's decision to hang small time drug peddlers was extreme. 'Singapore is a democracy', he said. 'We here are living under a strict, harsh government, but we don't hang people in Myanmar'.
The links between Singapore and the drug lords began to surface in the 1990s and were highlighted by investigative journalists Leslie Kean and Dennis Bernstein in Covert Action Quarterly. In 1996, it emerged that the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation had coinvested with Lo in the Traders and Shangri-la hotels in Rangoon through its 21.5 per cent stake in the US$39 million Myanmar Fund. Many Singapore companies are involved in Asia World and $900 million-plus a year pours into Burma in private investment from Singapore. The contradiction of the Singapore government executing those caught with more than 15 grams of heroin while doing business with the drug masters is not lost on some in the island state. Kean and Bernstein's damning article, published in 1998, that went without challenge, was entitled 'Burma-Singapore Axis: Globalising The Heroin Trade'. Quoting Mya Maung, a Burmese economist based in Boston, they wrote: 'Singapore's economic linkage with Burma is one of the most vital factors for the survival of Burma's military regime. This link is also central to the expansion of the heroin trade'. Singapore has achieved the distinction of being the military junta's number one business partner - both largest trading partner and largest foreign investor. More than half these investments, upwards of $1.3 billion, are in partnership with Lo who controls a substantial portion of the world's opium trade. The close political, economic and military relationship between the two countries facilitates the weaving of millions of narco- dollars into the legitimate world economy.
Singapore has become a major player in Asian commerce. According to Steven Green, a former US Ambassador to Singapore, free market policies have 'allowed this small country to develop one of the world's most successful trading and investment economies'. Singapore also has a strong role in the powerful 153-member World Trade Organisation. Indeed, the tiny island is known far and wide as the blue chip of the region, a financial trading base and a route for the vast sums of money that flow in and out of Asia. If the brutal Burma dictatorship's international pariah status is of any concern to its more powerful partner, Singapore shows no sign of it. In March 1994 following a visit of Singapore's then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong to Rangoon, a Singapore spokesperson proclaimed, 'Singapore and Myanmar should continue to explore areas where they can complement each other'. As both countries continue to celebrate their 'complementary' relationship, the international community must take note of the powerful support this relationship provides both to its illegitimate regime and to its booming billion dollar drug trade. The Burmese military dictatorship - known by the sinister-sounding acronym SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council) until it changed its name to the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) in November 1997 - depends on the resources of Burma's drug barons for its financial survival. After the military seized power in 1988, opium production doubled by the mid-1990s, equalling all legal exports and making the country the world's biggest heroin supplier. At that time, Burma was supplying the US with 60 per cent of its heroin imports and soon after become a major regional producer of methamphetamines. With 50 per cent of the economy unaccounted for, drug traffickers, businessmen and government officials are able to integrate spectacular profits throughout Burma's permanent economy.
Both the Burmese generals and drug lords have been able to take advantage of Singapore's liberal banking laws and money laundering opportunities. In 1991, for example, the SLORC laundered $400 million through a Singapore bank which it used as a down payment for Chinese arms. Despite the large sum, Myanmar s foreign exchange reserves registered no change either before or after the sale. With no laws to prevent money laundering, Singapore is widely reported to be a financial haven for Burma's elite, including Lo and Khun Sa, another drug trafficker, also known by his Chinese name Chang Qifu. After being given an alleged makeover deal to stay out of the drugs trade, Khun Sa became a 'commercial real estate agent' with a foot in Burma's
construction industry. Already long in control of a bus route into the northern poppy-growing region where the military has always been actively involved in the drug business, he later invested $250 million in a new highway between Rangoon and Mandalay, an SPDC cabinet member confirmed. Banphot Piamdi, director of Thailand's Northern Reg
ion's Narcotics Suppression Center: "The government of Burma says one thing but does another. It claims to have subdued Khun Sa's group. However the fact is that the group came under the supervision of Khun Sa's son who has received permission from Rangoon to produce narcotics in the areas along the Thai-Burmese border'. Khun Sa's son is not the only trafficker reaping benefits in the Shan State area which borders Thailand and China and serves as Burma's primary poppy growing area.
Field intelligence and ethnic militia sources consistently reported a pattern of Burmese military involvement with drug production in these remote areas. Government troops offer protection to the heroin and amphetamine refineries in the area in exchange for payoffs and gifts, such as Toyota sedans, pistols and army uniforms. The only access to the refineries is through permits issued by military intelligence. Without them the heavily guarded areas surrounding the refineries are too dangerous to approach. The military is also involved in protecting the transport of narcotics throughout the region which the authorities have sealed off from the outside world. A 1998 US government narcotics report revealed: "There are persistent and reliable reports that officials, particularly army personnel posted in outlying areas, are involved in the drug business. Army personnel wield considerable political clout locally, and their involvement in trafficking is a significant problem'. Intelligence sources, working for ethnic leaders combating both the drug trade and the military dictatorship, reported many years ago that the pattern of government involvement extends all the way to the top - and still does to this day. The central government in Rangoon demands funds on a regular basis from regional commanders who, in turn, expect payoffs from the rank and file. The soldiers get the money any way they can - through smuggling, gambling or selling jade - with drugs being the most accessible source of revenue in Shan State. The officers in the field also 'tax' refineries, drug transporters and opium farmers. Those who can pay are allowed to run the heroin refineries.
Once a Jolly Hangman Page 23