Forty-seven potential hangmen interviewed

Sri Lanka on Wednesday began interviewing 47 applicants for two positions as hangmen, two months after President Maithripala Sirisena announced the country would end a 43-year moratorium on executions in a Philippines-inspired war on drugs.

An official said 47 male applicants would be interviewed on Wednesday and Thursday after the government advertised the vacancies in February.

The official noted that as there were no professionals in the country, the preferred candidates would have to be trained offshore.

“Since there is no living person in Sri Lanka who has carried out an execution, we need to send the new recruits abroad for training,” said the official, who asked to remain anonymous, adding that Colombo was also yet to identify a country to provide training.

“The rope (used for hangings) has not been used at all since it was imported (in 2015), it will have to be tested and certified,” the official said.

Sri Lanka’s last judicial hanging was in 1976. The country’s last hangman quit in 2014 without ever having to execute anyone, citing stress after seeing the gallows for the first time. Another hired last year never turned up for work.

An advertisement published in the state-run Daily News in February put the monthly pay at 36,310 rupees (US$200), which would be above average for a government job.

Candidates should be Sri Lankan, male, aged between 18 and 45, and have both “excellent moral character” and “mental strength”, the advert said.

In a nationally televised event in Colombo, Sirisena pledged to end the spread of narcotics within two years. Restoring capital punishment is a centerpiece of his anti-drugs policy.

Sirisena in February said he was inspired by the Philippines’ anti-drug war and was keen to replicate the success of his counterpart Rodrigo Duterte, calling the Southeast Asian nation’s crackdown “an example to the world”.

Criminals in Sri Lanka are regularly given death sentences for murder, rape and drug-related crimes but until now their punishments have been commuted to life in jail.

On Monday, Sirisena witnessed the destruction of nearly 800kg of cocaine seized between 2016 and 2018.

In February, police seized nearly 300kg of heroin worth US$17 million, the island’s biggest haul, at a Colombo shopping center. In 2013, police seized 260 kilos of heroin brought into the country hidden inside tractors imported from Pakistan.

Sri Lanka’s biggest drug haul, by weight, was in December 2016 when police seized 800kg of cocaine. Six months earlier, authorities discovered 301kg of cocaine inside a shipping container.

Authorities believe the Indian Ocean island is also being used as a trafficking transit point.

Source: AFP/Reuters
-Agencies