At least 27 Vietnamese trans-border drug kingpins, found guilty of smuggling illicit substances have been sentenced to death by a High Court in Vietnam.
The convicts, led by the notorious female crime boss Vu Hoang Anh, alias Oanh Ha, bagged the death penalty after being found in possession of over 600kg of narcotics and other substances.
During the ruling, the court noted that Oanh Ha’s 35-member ring had smuggled 626 kilos (1,380 pounds) of drugs from Cambodia into Vietnam between March 2018 and November 2022, using social media networks like Signal and adopting nicknames like “Colombia” and “Mosscau” or “Mosscau Russia” to avoid detection.
Meanwhile, the court sentenced the remaining eight members to various jail terms ranging from 20 years to life, citing the case as a serious cross-border drug trafficking operation that had been carried out over a long period.
According to the court, Oanh had led the defendants in successfully transporting and trafficking 626 kilos of drugs from Cambodia for consumption in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and other cities in Vietnam. Furthermore,
The indictment revealed that from early 2020 onwards, Oanh had transferred up to $20,000 per trip to traffickers who had transported the drugs concealed in cars or engine blocks. In total, 129 engine blocks had been smuggled successfully from Cambodia to Vietnam, highlighting the sophistication and scale of the operation.
As a country with some of the toughest drug laws in the world, Vietnam’s communist government has a reputation for being notoriously secretive about its executions.
In recent years, there have been several high-profile cases of foreigners being arrested and sentenced to death or life imprisonment for drug smuggling in Vietnam, underscoring the risks and consequences of engaging in such activities.
