NEWS - Vietnam busts huge drug traf

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Subject: NEWS - Vietnam busts huge drug trafficking ring-media

Vietnam busts huge drug trafficking ring-media

  
HANOI, Nov 11 (Reuters) - 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. 

00:55 11-11-99