Kuala Lumpur-born hangman Darshan Singh told them to be brave as they were being sent to a “better place” before pulling the lever.

Some death row inmates at Changi Prison are believed to have asked for him, his granddaughter, Poojaa Darshan Kaur Gill, once said.

She said Darshan put the doomed prisoners at ease, especially those who did not receive visitors or religious support.

Singapore’s most prolific executioner, who grew up in Sentul, died on Sunday following Covid-19 complications. He was 89.

He and his teammate in the Selangor combined schools hockey team, A Muthucumarasamy, joined the Singapore prison service at the same time in 1957.

Darshan quit as Singapore’s longest-serving executioner in 2006 and Muthucumarasamy, also 89, retired years earlier as prisons assistant director.

In retirement, Darshan told The Straits Times he missed his job, saying: “Yes, I know how to keep them happy. I know the art of giving them a good drop.”

In a single day on Oct 29, 1965, he hanged 18 former secret society gangsters, three at a time.

They had been convicted of killing four prison officers during a riot on the former penal island of Pulau Senang two years earlier.

In 1975, he hanged seven men in 90 minutes. They had killed a businessman and his two employees over 120 gold bars.

Others who met their end through Darshan included Sunny Ang, who was convicted for killing a woman at sea in 1965, although her body was never found.

Among the women he executed were Mimi Wong in 1973 for killing her Japanese lover’s wife, and young Filipina maid Flor Contemplacion in 1991 for the murder of her co-worker and her four-year-old son.

Darshan was the hangman on Fridays. His wife, Jeleha Said, said in interviews that after he was done, he would play cricket and hockey at the Singapore Recreation Club field.

He was also a controversial figure who made a spectacle of himself in the media, said former British roving journalist, Tom Shaw, who covered some high-profile hangings in the republic.

Shaw said: “He was reckless with his comments to the media to whom he was forbidden under the Official Secrets Act from talking about his work.

“While hangmen in most countries hide their true identities, Darshan went public over certain issues, tying up the Singapore government in knots.”

In 2005, about five weeks before the execution of Australian drug smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van, The Australian newspaper revealed a state secret by showing him on the front page.

Darshan also ignited global outrage by boasting that if anyone else other than him carried out executions, “they (the prisoners) will struggle like chickens, like fish out of the water”.

He was fired after he told Reuters in another interview that he celebrated his 500th execution with several bottles of whisky.

An annoyed Singapore government then sanctioned the tabloid, The New Paper, to run a double-page spread, portraying Darshan as a solid civil servant.

Darshan said he had been tricked into an interview that portrayed him as a laughing executioner who only did it for the money.

His dismissal was revoked and on December 2, 2005, Nguyen was executed by an unknown hangman.

Darshan retired a year later but came back into the public eye in 2010 with his chilling accounts of executions in a book, “Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock” by Alan Shadrake, a British journalist, author and anti-capital punishment advocate.

For his broadside against Singapore’s justice system, Shadrake was found guilty of contempt of court over 11 passages in his book and sentenced to six weeks’ jail.