Dang Thai Long (L) and Bui Thi Thuy at the Da Nang People's Court, 24 April 2021

VIETNAM: HANOI DRUG TRAFFICKER SENTENCED TO DEATH

April 26, 2021:

A Da Nang court sentenced one man to death and a woman to life imprisonment on 24 April 2021 for storing and transporting five kilos of drugs.
The Da Nang People’s Court found Dang Thai Long, 45, guilty of storing and transporting narcotics and awarded him a death sentence. Bui Thi Thuy, 43, was given life imprisonment for illegally transporting narcotics.
According to the indictment, on 17 September 2019, Long and Thuy of Hanoi took a train to Da Nang in central Vietnam with a plan to transport drugs and sell them to local drug users.
Two days later, Long received a phone call from a man called Hieu (who is yet to be found), who hired him to go to Laos, collect drugs and take them to 36-year-old Nguyen Kim Thang in Hanoi for VND295 million ($12,830).
Long took a bus to Vientiane, where Hieu took him to a hotel and handed over 39 packages of methamphetamine (around four kg), three packages of around 3,000 ecstasy pills, and 170 pills of amphetamine.
Long divided the drugs and hid them in rice cookers that he bought and sent them to Vietnam by bus. He took a flight back to the country.
On the afternoon of 23 September 2019, he called Thuy and told her to go to a bus station on Da Nang’s Hoang Van Thai Street to receive the drugs. The woman was caught red-handed by local police officers.
In Hanoi, police discovered a large amount of drugs in Long’s house in Hoang Mai District.
He told the police that by hiding drugs in rice cookers, he had successfully transported drugs from Laos to Vietnam four times, earning VND700 million ($30,447).