A BUNDLE of anguished letters and pledges of undying love have become a heart-breaking Christmas memento for the fiance of a Hong Kong woman hanged in Singapore 48 hours ago.
A final missive from Elke Tsang Kai-mong's death row cell spoke of her despair over feelings that her parents had 'disowned her rather than suffer a loss of face'.
Tsang, the daughter of Hong Kong West Auxiliary Police Senior Superintendent Tsang Nim-tong, was executed on Friday morning after being convicted of trafficking in heroin at Changi Airport.
Tsang's Singapore lawyers filed a last-ditch plea for a stay of execution until Lunar New Year, asking President Ong Teng Cheong to give the woman's father time to recover from an illness before flying to visit her. It was rejected 12 hours before the dawn execution on Friday.
Tsang's father is understood to have refused all attempts to publicise his daughter's plight. Tsang's Hong Kong boyfriend, who asked to be named only as 'Ah Lam', said the pair had written constantly while she awaited the outcome of a series of appeals for clemency.
The 30-year-old former Hunghom woman described her agony at being cut adrift from her family and pledged that 'if by some miracle' she was pardoned, she would return to Hong Kong to wed Ah Lam.
'I have been crying until my eyes are swollen,' she told him in her final epistle last month. They met at a disco 10 years ago and Tsang wrote every month from her tiny death-row cell, he said.
