The Execution Of Akmal Shaikh

The whole incident is very sad; and my sympathies to his family.

One has met enough illness deniers during the course of one's life to give Mr. Shaikh the benefit of the doubt regarding his bipolar disorder. This would almost certainly render him sufficiently vulnerable to be duped into carrying drugs.

If there are lessons to be learned from this, the principal ones would seem to be that while one cannot live the disableds' lives for them, by the same token for a delusional man to be roaming around Eastern Europe to the extent that he's able to fall into the clutches of drug smugglers might perhaps indicate that the supervision of the mentally ill remains chronically defective.

And while the BBC might describe him an a 'EU national' as if the EU were a nation, I would hope that this incident deters people from going to China. One nation perpetrates 72% of the world's executions. That is not a penal system. That is a bloodlust.