Reports that Darshan Singh, who had been the hangman for 850 of Singapore’s executions, had been sacked after an interview with an Australian newspaper are being denied by the city state.

Singapore - Prison authorities denied sacking Singapore’s hangman after the 74-year-old executioner told Australia media he was ready to retire, but shed no light on who will place the noose around a condemned Australian drug trafficker’s neck on Friday.

‘Darshan Singh has not been ’sacked’ and continues to be a contract officer engaged by the Prisons Department,’ a spokesman confirmed on Tuesday. ‘There is no change to his status.’

Singh, a Sikh who converted to the Moslem faith, revealed his identity in an Australia newspaper interview last week and said he would like to retire but no one wanted his job.

On Sunday Singh said he had been informed of his sacking by the department and that someone else would be flown in to conduct the hanging of Vietnamese-born Melbourne man Nguyen Tuong Van, sentenced to death after he was caught with nearly 400 grams of heroin while in transit from Cambodia to Melboune three years ago.

The department had no response yet to Australia’s plea that Nguyen’s mother, Kim Nguyen, be allowed to hug her son before his death.

AsiaPundit opposes capital punishment, if only because justice systems are fallible. Still Harry Hutton makes a persuasive argument.:

They are hanging Nguyen Tuong Van in the morning. I am not myself in favour of hanging Australians. I’m in favour of beheading them, but hanging is oafish. The government of Singapore has come in for a lot of criticism for this unpleasant fetish of theirs; but as long as they are sure, beyond all reasonable doubt, that he is Australian… As David C says in the comments, which of us can honestly put his hand on his heart and say that we haven’t at some time wanted to hang an Aussie? I know I have.

Let he who is without motes in his eye cast the first beam.

I don’t know why the government of Australia doesn’t string up a couple of Singaporeans in retaliation. That’s what I would do. It’s idiotic, but sometimes idiocy is all we have left.

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