'Would've died 100 times'

"If he were a Chinese, he would have been shot to death 100 times," a local judicial insider familiar with the case, who preferred to remain anonymous, told the Global Times Tuesday.

According to Chinese law, anyone who traffics, transports or produces heroin of more than 50 grams within Chinese territory may face the death sentence.

"Luckily, he is a foreigner, so the Chinese authority is quite cautious with his case, as the local court has provided me and the British embassy in China with all the evidence and the trial documents," he said.

Shaikh was found to have connections with one of the biggest drug dealers in South-east Asia, the insider said. He did not give the name of the drug dealer.

Professor He Bingsong, a vice-director with the Institute of Criminal Laws at the China University of Political Science and Law, agreed with the court rulings.

"It is unreasonable and useless for any foreign country to mess with China's right to implement its own law," he said. "Everyone is equal here."

He insisted that China should ignore the intervention and not surrender to any foreign political pressure.

However, the judicial insider mentioned the only question left is whether the court should carry out forensic psychiatry.

"Shaikh himself refused the request to undergo forensic psychiatry, claiming he is mentally healthy," he said.

Shaikh appeared to be articulate when he spoke to the lawyer and the court, and the accounts on different occasions were consistent, according to him.

"We have to make it clear whether he was suffering from his condition while conducting drug trafficking. If not, the verdict will not be changed," Chen Tao, a lawyer on criminal law at the Association of Beijing Lawyers, told the Global Times.

Ma Zhaoxu, another spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said on October 13 that the British embassy in China and Reprieve had proposed to carry out mental health examinations on Shaikh, while offering no evidence that he may be suffering from a mental disorder.

The accused had said that he and his family members had no history of mental illness, Ma said.

In recent years, an increasing number of foreigners have been held in China for crimes including robbery, fraud, women trafficking and illegal immigration business.

A Myanmar citizen was executed in 2004 in the southeastern city of Kunming. A Japanese citizen was sentenced to death in 2007 for trafficking 1.25 kilograms of crystal meth, even though the Japanese embassy tried hard to prevent the execution.

China, often criticized by foreign countries for its liberal use of death penalty, has been taking steps to reduce the number of executions in recent years.

China's Supreme People's Court (SPC) regained the right of death-penalty review in January 2007, in a bid to give local convicts a better chance of reprieve.

Official figures of executions are not available. But data from Amnesty International showed that at least 1,718 people were executed last year, among at least 7,003 people who were sentenced to death.

The UK abolished capital punishment in 1965.