24 lashes for UK ex-public schoolboy in Singapore
Diplomatic row as Briton jailed for drug crimes flayed in Singapore
A FORMER British public schoolboy has been flogged naked in Singapore for drugs offences.
London-born Ye Ming Yuen, 31, who went to £41,000-a-year Westminster School, was strapped to a large wooden trestle before being caned 24 times.
The brutal punishment was carried out yesterday, a week after Yuen lost his final appeal against the sentence,
Last night the Foreign Office condemned the decision to lash his bare buttocks with a 4ft rattan cane.
The ‘judicial corporal punishment’ was conducted despite calls for leniency from Home Secretary Priti Patel and ex-foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt. Yuen was caned in the city-state’s Changi Prison where he is serving 20 years for drug offences.
Last night Yuen’s sister Elysia Yuen, 32, said: ‘I am amazed that Ming, who’d been so scared, had the physical and mental capacity to get through 24 strokes in one go. [We were] told Ming was very strong during the caning and afterwards too.
‘Ming knows what he did was wrong and deserved to be punished. We know it’s a different country with different laws and you should respect those laws, but isn’t a 20-year prison sentence punishment enough?’
In a statement, the British High Commission in Singapore said: ‘The UK strongly opposes corporal punishment in all circumstances and condemns its use in this case.’
Yuen’s case was first revealed by the Mail in January last year. Mr Hunt raised it with Singapore’s minister for foreign affairs when he visited the country that month. Since then Foreign Office officials have made further representations on Yuen’s behalf, while human rights groups condemned Singapore’s use of the cane, saying it breaches the UN Convention Against Torture.
Yuen was first arrested over drugs offences in August 2016.
According to his family, who live in the UK, the only furniture he has in his cell, where he spends 22 hours a day, is a bamboo mat. He is allowed only two visits from his family a month.
A former club DJ in Singapore, his offences include two counts of ‘repeat drug trafficking’ – one of 69g and one of 60g of cannabis.
Another offence included drug trafficking of 15g of crystal meth.
Before moving to Singapore in 2007, Yuen – the son of a marketing consultant from China and a Singapore-born marketing executive – was a pupil at Dulwich Prep School in south London and then Westminster School, which is next to Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.
At Westminster School he gained 11 GCSEs, four A*s, six As, and one B. But while at the top public school he ‘got in with the wrong crowd’ and ended up in trouble with the police.
In 2007, it emerged that Yuen was wanted by Scotland Yard over an alleged forged driving licences scam.
A newspaper tracked him down to Singapore, where he reportedly admitted that he manufactured fake documents and sold them to pupils.
A spokesman for the Singapore High Commission in London has previously told the Mail: ‘Singapore deals with the drug problem comprehensively with the strictest enforcement coupled with the severest of penalties to protect the welfare of the public and our collective aspiration to live and raise our children in a safe oasis.’
But human rights groups say caning in Singapore is a violation of international law and breaches the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
Caning in Singapore is mandatory in dozens of offences, including attempted murder and rape. Only medically fit men aged 16 to 50 are caned.
‘He fell in with the wrong crowd’