~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

[Year 1997]
[Year 1998]
[Year 1999]
[Year 2000]
[Year 2001]

Vietnam busts huge drug trafficking ring-media

HANOI - Vietnamese authorities have smashed the country's biggest drug trafficking ring, which allegedly comprised a network of 120 people across 14 provinces, official media reported on Thursday.

The Saigon Giai Phong (Saigon Liberation) daily quoted police as saying the ring, which included Vietnamese security officials and government employees, had smuggled in hundreds of kilograms of heroin since the early 1990s. More than 30 people were arrested recently, and prosecutors were compiling dossiers for a trial scheduled to begin at the end of December, possibly in Hanoi, it added. An official at the People's Supreme Prosecution Institute in Hanoi confirmed the number of arrests, but declined to give details.

Testimony from one of those arrested showed that since 1994 one courier alone had smuggled in 778 packs of heroin weighing a 272.3 kg (600 lb) and more than one tonne of opium, the daily said. Heroin is derived from opium.

It was unclear whether more arrests would be made, where the drugs came from and how much was seized. The newspaper did not say if the drugs were for use in Vietnam or give th street value of the heroin. The case broke when police found two packs of heroin hidden in an eight-year-old child's backpack in the northern city of Nam Dinh, the newspaper said.

Trafficking as little as 100 grams (3.3 ounces) of heroin is punishable in communist Vietnam by death or life imprisonment. Vietnam has been identified by anti-drug agencies as an important post in the heroin trafficking route from the Golden Triangle region centred on Myanmar, Laos and parts of southwestern China and northern Thailand.
The country also has its own heroin addiction problem. Last year, courts sentenced 49 people to death and arrested 18,000 for drug-related crimes, official media have reported.

Reuters - November 11, 1999.