Touch of hand permitted for final goodbye

SINGAPORE - Condemned Australian heroin smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van was yesterday permitted to hold hands with his mother and brother as he said goodbye for the last time.

Nguyen will be handcuffed and taken to the gallows in Singapore's Changi Prison at 6am today local time (11am NZDT) to be hanged for drug trafficking.

With all avenues to save him from execution exhausted, Nguyen's family, supporters and the Australian Government had begged Singapore to allow Kim Nguyen to hug her son one last time.

Yesterday the Singaporean authorities bowed to diplomatic pressure to allow "limited" physical contact between the 25-year-old Melbourne salesman, his mother and twin brother Khoa during their final visit.

Earlier the Australian Government has dropped diplomacy and called Singapore's plan to hang the smuggler "barbaric".

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock criticised the imposition of the death penalty, especially in Nguyen's case, which he said had mitigating circumstances - Nguyen said he smuggled the drugs to try to pay off loan-shark debt for his brother in Australia.

"It's a most unfortunate, barbaric act that is occurring," Ruddock told Australian television.

But in a macabre compromise, the Singaporeans said Nguyen would be allowed to hold hands with his mother and brother, saying it had made an exception for Nguyen following a personal plea by Prime Minister John Howard to his counterpart, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, at the recent Commonwealth leaders' conference in Malta.

Friends said Kim Nguyen, who arrived at Changi Prison yesterday with distress etched on her face and a handkerchief clutched tightly in her hand, was desperate to be able to hold her son for a final time.

M. Ravi, a human rights lawyer who has worked on death penalty cases and campaigned to save Nguyen, said he could not fathom Singapore's decision.

"To say you can't hug is abominable. I am lost for words," he said.

"How can you just restrict it to the hand and not have bodily contact?"

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer welcomed Singapore's concession as better than nothing, adding: "It'll perhaps be very meagre compensation - of course it will be - but it will be nice that they can touch each other".

Also bidding farewell yesterday was Nguyen's twin brother, Khoa, whose legal debts the condemned man says he was trying to pay off when he tried to smuggle nearly 400gm of heroin to Australia through Singapore in 2002.

Nguyen's lawyer, Lex Lasry, said his final "beautiful" visit to Nguyen was unforgettable.

"It was good. It was extremely difficult, of course. Emotional, But you have to say it was a satisfying hour and a half, unforgettable.

"It was a great visit and quite uplifting," Lasry said.

"The thing that strikes me about this is we were looking into the eyes of a healthy young 25-year-old man with so much to offer who is going to die a violent death.

"The violence of the death he is going to die is so much at odds with the sort of person he is.

"I just find it an appalling injustice."

- REUTERS, AAP