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SCMP Reporter

THE mother of Angel Mou Pui-peng, who will be executed in Singapore next week, is pleading with a syndicate member to save her 25-year-old daughter from the gallows.

 Wong Siu-mui, 58, said the family had tried to persuade Sia Khim-meng, who is serving a four-year sentence in Stanley prison, to accept sole responsibility for Mou's drug-running mission to Singapore.

  But Sia, 30, has not responded to their plea.

  'He has refused to see us in jail. He didn't even open the letter we sent him. I beg him to let my daughter live. I am begging him now,' said the tearful mother.

  'All we want is for him to write a few words for my daughter. All he needs to do is to state my daughter didn't know what was in the bag,' she added.

   Sia was the first person brought before a local court for helping people in Hong Kong to commit an offence outside the territory.

  He was convicted of 'doing an act preparatory to trafficking in dangerous drugs' and is said to have had two meetings with Mou and her sister in Hong Kong before they went to Bangkok to pick up drugs to take to Europe.

  Mou has said she thought she was carrying contraband Rolex wristwatches to Amsterdam for the syndicate.

  'It was her first trip abroad. I told her to be careful. She said it would be all right,' said Ms Wong.

  Ms Wong said that, before she went on the ill-fated trip, Mou had told her to worship the evil spirits. 'I asked her why I would want to do that. She said she was told this would rid her of bad luck. So I did it.'   Ms Wong, who used to sell fishballs in the markets, said she heard on the radio that a woman of her daughter's age had been arrested for drug trafficking in Singapore.

  'I sat there thinking it couldn't be her. I was in a daze. The radio report only mentioned her surname.

  'I went home to tell my other children. They said it couldn't be her.

  'Then, we received a phone call from a stranger. He said my daughter asked him to ring me.

  'He told me my daughter had been set up. He told me she had been detained. He said she was in deep sorrow and that she hadn't eaten for days.

  'The man then said he knew I had no money, but I should pawn all I had to visit her in Singapore.'   Ms Wong said the family was planning to leave for Singapore next week to pay final visits but they first had to break the news to Mou's nine-year-old son, who was told Mou was working in Singapore.

  'We have to take him. The boy is her dearest. She needs to see her son.

  'The poor boy doesn't have a father. Now he will have no mother. He is going to suffer the most.'   The family is also agonising over whether it could raise enough money for four round-trip plane tickets to Singapore.

  Mou's sister, a sales representatives, is the only breadwinner in the family. Ms Wong said Mou's husband has not visited her since her arrest.

  'She wouldn't have gone away with these people if she had not had an unhappy marriage,' said Ms Wong.

  Mou, a Hong Kong resident holding a Portuguese passport because she was born in Macau, was arrested at Changi Airport in 1991 with a suitcase containing 5.6 kilograms of heroin.

  The Portuguese Government has written to the Singapore authorities urging them to spare Mou.

  Portugal's ambassador to Singapore, Sebastiao De Castello Branco, has described Mou as being 'so poorly educated that she could not grasp the seriousness of the crime of drug smuggling'.



Mother pleads for trafficker Angel's life