Tangaraju Suppiah (Tamil: தங்கராசு சுப்பையா; 19 January 1977 – 26 April 2023) was a Singaporean convicted drug trafficker who was charged in February 2014 with abetting the trafficking of about of cannabis (also known as marijuana). Prior to his arrest in 2014, Tangaraju had been to prison several times for marijuana consumption and other marijuana offences, and was said to be a user of it since he was 12. He was found guilty and sentenced to death on 9 October 2018, as the trial court found that he conspired with another man to deliver the marijuana as confirmed by the circumstantial evidence against Tangaraju.
Tangaraju, along with his defence, appealed against his sentence by claiming innocence several times but ultimately failed each time. Although the courts had affirmed Tangaraju's guilt, there were protests from his family and activists who claimed he was innocent of the crime. The government rejected such claims and stated that Tangaraju was guilty of the offence charged and had been accorded full due process. Tangaraju was hanged at Changi Prison at dawn on 26 April 2023.
Biography Tangaraju Suppiah was born in Singapore in 1977. He grew up in a single-parent family and had one elder sister (born 1974), with whom he had lost contact since age 19 for unknown reasons. His mother worked as a road sweeper for eighteen years to take care of her family.
Tangaraju, who only had five years of primary school education, began to consume marijuana when he was 12, and was first imprisoned for drug offences aged 14. Tangaraju subsequently spent most of the rest of his life in and out prison for marijuana consumption and possession.
Background to arrest On 6 September 2013, before he could exit Singapore via the Tuas Checkpoint, a Malaysian named Mogan Valo was arrested by the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) shortly after 10:00 pm. During a vehicle search, two packages containing a total of of marijuana (or cannabis) were found inside the Proton Persona Mogan was driving. While under interrogation by the CNB officers, Mogan confessed that a man named "India" (whom he never met physically) instructed him to deliver the drugs, and someone else provided him the two phone numbers to contact "India", whose description was a man in his thirties, was about tall, had a long fringe, wore a lot of gold jewellery and drove a white van. Under a follow-up operation to arrest "India", Mogan called "India" at 11:50 pm and arranged to meet up with him at the McDonald's restaurant at West Coast Park, with the phone call made under surveillance of the officers and the officers laying in ambush at the location at around 1:00 am. CNB officers managed to arrest a Singaporean man named Suresh Subramaniam at the toilet. However, Mogan informed the CNB officers he had never met this man before and did not know who he was, meaning he was not "India". This was further supported by the subsequent phone calls made to "India", who claimed he asked a friend to come to the restaurant to collect the drugs from Mogan.
Subsequently, the phones of both men were analyzed and it was found that both men were in contact with the same person claiming to be "India", despite the fact that "India"'s two numbers were saved under different names by both persons. In March 2014, the police identified "India" as 37-year-old Tangaraju Suppiah (a childhood friend of Suresh), and arrested him after linking him to the drug offences committed by Mogan. Tangaraju was already in remand facing unrelated charges of drug consumption, and was arrested that same month after jumping bail and failing to report for urine tests since September 2013. Under the law, the death sentence was mandated for anyone found guilty of trafficking at least of marijuana under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Evidence from Suresh showed that on the day of his capture, when he was at McDonald's to buy dinner before he report for a urine test, Tangaraju had called him several times to check if a vehicle matching the description of his friend was here, and if someone was in the toilets, which implied that Tangaraju was the mysterious "India" who instigated Mogan to traffic the marijuana.
According to his sister, the prosecution originally offered a plea bargain to Tangaraju before his trial, which would involve him serving 20 years in prison (later amended to 15 years and later to 12 years) for a reduced drug charge, but Tangaraju rejected it and decided to stand trial for the original charge maintaining his innocence.
Drug trafficking trial Three years after his arrest, Tangaraju stood trial at the High Court on 3 October 2017, with Anandan Bala and Kee Yongwen Kenneth appointed the trial prosecutors and Ram Goswami and Cheng Kim Kuan acting for the defence. Tangaraju denied that he was the one who instructed Mogan to traffic and deliver the drugs, or having asked Suresh to collect drugs, or having arranged to meet somebody himself to collect drugs on 6 September 2013 at the McDonald's at West Coast Park. Before the start of the trial, Mogan had already pleaded guilty to a non-capital charge of trafficking of marijuana and was sentenced to 23 years' imprisonment and 15 strokes of the cane.
Although Tangaraju admitted that the two numbers (one for work and one for personal use) indeed belonged to him, Tangaraju argued that he lost his mobile phone that contained one of these two numbers, and it could have been picked up by someone else to contact Mogan. Furthermore, Tangaraju's lawyers also argued that the man "India" whom Mogan contacted was actually Suresh, who fit the description of "India" more than Tangaraju himself (Suresh was 37 years old at the time, was about 1.76m in height, and wore three pieces of gold jewellery), and Suresh framed Tangaraju to avoid getting the death penalty for drug trafficking. However, the prosecution argued the user of the first mobile phone number Mogan was in contact with could not have been Suresh, since his mobile phones were seized upon his arrest at the McDonald's, and after the CNB officers directed Mogan to call "India" to ascertain whether the police had arrested the right man, the call was received by another person, meaning that "India" and Suresh could not have been the same person. The fact that Mogan spoke to "India" five times from 1.20 am till 2.00 am, while Suresh was under arrest, served as further confirmation that Suresh could not be "India". Suresh, who came to court as a witness, was not subjected to further action by the authorities since he received a discharge not amounting to acquittal after being charged with conspiracy with unknown persons to traffic in marijuana.
At the end of the trial, Justice Hoo Sheau Peng, the trial judge presiding over Tangaraju's trial, delivered her verdict. Justice Hoo stated that she was satisfied based on the circumstantial evidence and testimonies of both Suresh and Mogan, Tangaraju was guilty of this charge, as she found that in his earlier statements, Tangaraju himself admitted to using the two phone numbers to contact Mogan and gave him orders to deliver drugs, before he later deviated from his confession and argued he was innocent and had lost his handphone, an allegation which he only raised two months after his capture while he recorded his final statement to police on 23 May 2014, and he could not explain about how Mogan could have had his second number on his phone if he had never met him before. The judge also remarked it was quite telling that both Mogan and Suresh had saved the first and second numbers with names that indicated that they were alternate contact numbers for the same person. Justice Hoo stated that based on this fact, she deemed Tangaraju an untruthful witness who lied about the loss of his handphones, and he clearly changed his story at a late stage to distance himself from his guilt and should he really be innocent, he would have at the first instance mentioned it rather than belatedly raised it in the middle of his trial.
The inability of the police to recover his handphone or phone records after his arrest in March 2014 did not have a bearing on the validity of his guilt, and Justice Hoo also rejected Tangaraju's allegations of being refused a Tamil interpreter during the recording of his statement, on the grounds that Tangaraju himself admitted at the start he never requested one and the officers confirmed that they never heard him requesting an interpreter. There was also no reason for Suresh to fabricate his evidence against Tangaraju and nothing to point to Suresh as "India" since he and Tangaraju were longtime friends and had no animosity with one another, and Suresh did not have anything to profit from Tangaraju's conviction. The judge also highlighted Mogan's statement that during his first phone call to "India" he was informed he could secure a job for Mogan at a mini-mart in Tuas. According to his own testimony, Tangaraju operated a mini-mart in Tuas and by his own evidence had the power to engage help as he saw fit, and this strengthened the case that "India" and Tangaraju were in fact the same person.
Therefore, Justice Hoo found 41-year-old Tangaraju Suppiah guilty of abetting the trafficking of cannabis by engaging in a conspiracy with another person, contrary to Section 12 of the Misuse of Drugs Act. Since Tangaraju was not a courier, he was sentenced to death on 9 October 2018. His appeal was dismissed by the Court of Appeal on 14 August 2019. Tangaraju was therefore incarcerated on death row at Changi Prison pending his execution.
Legal appeals After the loss of his appeal, Tangaraju and 21 other death row prisoners filed a lawsuit against the Attorney-General of Singapore. The lawsuit was about allegations that the private letters between the death row inmates and both their lawyers and families were being forwarded to the Attorney General's Chambers (AGC) by the prison authorities without the inmates' permission, which they claimed was a breach of the inmates' rights. The claims were rejected, and the lawsuit was dismissed on 16 March 2021.
On 3 August 2022, Tangaraju and 23 other prisoners sued the Attorney-General for the obstruction of the inmates' access to defence counsel, which led to many death row inmates (including those who had their hangings scheduled) having to argue their appeals without a lawyer, which allegedly disadvantaged the inmates in court proceedings. However, the lawsuit was rejected by the courts as the judges held that lawyers have legitimate reasons to turn down the death row cases and there was no evidence that the strict court orders and monetary penalties issued to the lawyers who made unmeritorious appeals (especially from the case of Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam) had led to many lawyers developing fear over defending the death row inmates.
In February 2023, Tangaraju filed a motion to the Court of Appeal, seeking to reopen his case and a review of his conviction due to a change in the law regarding prosecutors' disclosure of material witness statements to the defence. However, after reviewing his case, Judge of Appeal Steven Chong Horng Siong rejected the motion as they found that even without the disclosure of witness accounts, Tangaraju's conviction would still stand in view of objective evidence and they pointed out that the lack of disclosure of phone call records could not be believed since by the time Tangaraju was arrested, the records were no longer there despite the police's best efforts to retrieve them and they could only obtain the subscription details. Tangaraju reportedly represented himself in this motion without a lawyer.
Notice of execution
On 19 April 2023, Tangaraju's sister received her brother's execution notice, in which the representatives of the Singapore Prison Service informed her that Tangaraju, then 46 years old, was scheduled to hang on 26 April 2023, exactly a week later. Tangaraju's death warrant was the first to issued in the year 2023.