Fury as China executes British drug smuggler

MPs were scathing about China. Ken Purchase , a former Foreign Office ministerial aide and a member of the Commons foreign affairs select committee, called China's actions "absolutely regrettable", adding that the country was trying to position itself in the mainstream of international affairs while persisting with "barbaric actions".

Would this be the same non-entity Ken Purchase (right) who voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war; voted very strongly for Labour's anti-terrorism laws; voted very strongly for introducing ID cards and voted a mixture of for and against the Iraq war?

It appears that the drug smuggler, Akmal Shaikh, was about as mentally ill as Stephen Fry (and me, come to that). He has been presented as some hapless halfwit who was tricked into carrying a suitcase full of heroin. He wasn't. Should he have been executed? I don't support the death penalty for non-violent crimes but the Chinese consider heroin a lethal drug which causes the deaths of thousands of people so maybe, as far as they were concerned, it was a crime of violence after all.