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SINGAPORE – A 38-year-old Malaysian man escaped the noose when the Court of Appeal acquitted him on Tuesday (October 13) of a drug courier charge.
Beh Chew Boo was arrested in 2016 for allegedly attempting to transport 499.97 g of methamphetamine across the Causeway. He was sentenced to death in January this year by the High Court.
However, despite the acquittal, he will remain in pre-trial detention while the court decides how to proceed with respect to four other charges related to his case, which have been temporarily dropped.
The higher court, chaired by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon and Appellate Judges Tay Yong Kwang and Steven Chong, found, among other things, that there was insufficient reason to show that Beh was fully aware that he was transporting drugs.
This was because his fingerprints and DNA were not on the packages, and the motorcycle he was driving, on which the drugs were found, was loaned from a friend and did not belong to him.
Beh was arrested on October 26, 2016, when he entered Singapore from Malaysia at the Woodlands checkpoint around 5:20 a.m. M. was riding a Malaysian registered motorcycle owned by his friend and former colleague, Lew Shyang Huei. Beh’s girlfriend, Ms. Ting Swee Ling, was in the back seat.
Police Officer Israel Rajan, who detained Beh and Ms. Ting for a routine check, found several packages of a crystalline substance inside the motorcycle’s storage compartment and arrested the duo. Later, investigations revealed that the packages contained methamphetamine.
When asked, Beh said she did not know the drugs were on the motorcycle she had borrowed. He also claimed that he had borrowed the motorcycle from Lew many times to enter Singapore as the toll rates were cheaper than if he were driving a car.
Beh also admitted that he recognized the drugs seized on the day of his arrest as “yao tou yuan” (a Chinese term for methamphetamine) since he had used those drugs on October 22, 2016, at a party organized by Lew.
However, Beh denied that the drugs found in the motorcycle’s storage compartment were his. He also claimed that he had never seen them before his arrest and that he did not know the contents of the packages until he unwrapped them.
Appeal Judge Tay Yong Kwang noted that Beh at the time of his trial was unable to rebut the presumptions of possession and knowledge and sentenced him accordingly.
But there were other factors that justified an acquittal, Judge Tay said.
For one thing, Beh’s DNA was not found on any of the drug packages, but Lew’s fingerprints and DNA were found on the inside and outside of the packages.
“Lew was inextricably linked to the drug packages on the motorcycle. Only his DNA was on the drug packages, a fact that the prosecution accepted as a suggestion that Lew was the person who packaged the drugs,” Judge Tay said.
Lew had been arrested on unrelated drug charges and had been sentenced in July 2018 to a seven-year prison term. He was in prison while Beh’s trial unfolded in July 2019, but was not called to testify.
Judge Tay said the prosecution, by deciding not to call Lew to the stand, even though he was “available to testify,” could not fully rebut Beh’s defense that he knew nothing about drugs.
“In the unique circumstances here, we are of the opinion that Beh’s account was not inherently incredible,” Judge Tay said.
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