Australian woman, 73, sentenced to death in
Vietnam for heroin trafficking
Nguyen Thi Huong found guilty of possessing 36 bars of soap
stuffed with 2.8kg of heroin as she was boarding a flight to Australia
A court in southern Vietnam has sentenced a 73-year-old Vietnam-born
Australian woman to death for trafficking heroin hidden in bars of soap,
several state-run media outlets reported on Thursday.
The Ho Chi Minh City people’s court found Nguyen Thi Huong guilty
on Wednesday of possessing 36 bars of soap stuffed with 2.8kg (6 lb) of heroin
in her baggage as she was boarding a flight to Australia in December 2014, the
Ho Chi Minh City Police newspaper said.
Court officials and Australian diplomats in the city could not be
reached for comment about the case. There was also no immediate response to
requests for information from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade.
Huong told the court she wanted to take them to Australia as gifts
and was not aware of what they contained.
However, the Ho Chi Minh City Police newspaper, controlled by the
city’s police, said Huong had failed to prove that the other woman was real.
The court ruled that the offence was “extremely dangerous to the
community” and found her guilty. She now faces death by lethal injection.
The Tuoi Tre newspaper published a photo of Huong covering her
mouth with her hands as she was taken from the court after the verdict. Huong
has 15 days in which to appeal against the death sentence.
The death penalty is applied in communist Vietnam in cases of
trafficking of 100 grams of heroin or more. In late 2013, Vietnam adopted the
use of lethal injections for capital cases instead of firing squads.
SOCIETY
Vietnam sentences 73-yr-old Aussie woman to death for
trafficking drugs
Tuoi Tre News
Updated : 06/30/2016 08:29 GMT + 7
evNext
A court in Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday sentenced an elderly Australian
national to death for trafficking 1.6kg of cocaine out of Vietnam in late 2014.
Nguyen Thi Huong, 73, received the sentence at her trial on
charges of “illegally transporting drugs.”
Huong was arrested at Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi
Minh City on December 10, 2014, when she was about to board a flight to
Australia, with 36 bars of ‘soap’ in her checked baggage.
Security forces took the suspected products for testing, which
later revealed that the ‘soap bars’ were in fact heroin, weighing a total of
1.63 kg.
The Australian woman told the court that she had been gifted those
‘soap bars’ by a woman named Helen, when they were on a trip to the coastal
city of Vung Tau. Huong said she only wanted to take those gifts back to
Australia with her, not knowing that they were drugs.
However, she failed to prove that there was really anyone called
Helen.
Defending Huong at the court, lawyer Nguyen Nguyen Thy and a
representative from the municipal foreign affairs department demanded a more
lenient sentence for her, citing her bad health and unstable memory at the age
of 73.
A representative from the Australian Consulate General in Ho Chi
Minh City suggested that Huong not get a death sentence, as capital punishment
has been abolished in all jurisdictions in Australia.
However, the court considered the act of trafficking 1.6kg of
drugs is a severe offense that is extremely dangerous to the community, so it
upheld the death sentence.
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