Vietnamese police confirm missing blogger is in their custody

A Vietnamese blogger believed to have been kidnapped in Thailand by secret agents last week has turned up in police custody in his home country.

Police in northern Vietnam’s Ha Tinh province announced Sunday that they found an unidentified person illegally entering the country via trails on its border with Laos. They were able to confirm that the person’s name was Duong Van Thai, born in 1982.

Duong Van Thai, also known as Thai Van Duong, is a blogger who fled to Thailand in 2018 fearing political persecution for his many posts and videos critical of the Vietnamese government and Communist Party leaders on Facebook and YouTube.

Duong had been in Thailand, applying for refugee status at the United Nations Refugee Agency office in Bangkok.

He disappeared on the morning of April 13 after leaving his rental house in Bangkok to pick up a friend at the airport. Calls from her to her cell phone that afternoon were not returned, several of her friends said.

According to one of his acquaintances, who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons, Duong had just finished a virtual immigration interview with UNHCR several hours before he disappeared.

Duong’s friends began to publicly claim that he was probably kidnapped by Vietnamese security forces and brought back to Vietnam after no one answered the door of his home on the night of the 14th.

similar case

They said his case was similar to that of blogger and Radio Free Asia contributor Truong Duy Nhat, who was abducted by Vietnamese security forces while applying for refugee status in Thailand in 2019.

Two months later, Nhat turned up in Vietnam and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in March 2020 for “abusing his position and authority,” charges the US State Department called “vague.”

In 2019, human rights activist Bach Hong Quyen told RFA that he and his family narrowly escaped a similar fate. While they were in an immigration detention center in Bangkok, the Vietnamese embassy requested their extradition, but with the UN putting a lot of pressure on their case, they were allowed to travel to Canada.

RFA contacted the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security and the Vietnamese Embassy in Bangkok to inquire about Duong’s case, but received no responses.

Also on Friday, Vietnam sentenced dissident blogger and FRG collaborator Nguyen Lan Thang to six years in prison for “spreading anti-state propaganda.”

The ruling came just hours before US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken landed in Hanoi for an official visit.

The US State Department condemned the sentence and urged the Vietnamese government to “immediately release and drop all charges against Nguyen Lan Thang and others who remain in detention for peacefully exercising and promoting human rights.”

Bill Hayton of Britain’s Chatham House think tank said Duong’s kidnapping was “clearly a message from the Ministry of Public Safety, demonstrating its power against the US.”

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.