A COURT has sentenced 27 people to death after finding them guilty of trafficking more than 600kg of narcotics.
Gang leader and notorious female crime boss Vu Hoang Anh, alias Oanh Ha, was among those condemned to death, the Tuoi Tre newspaper reported.
The 35-member ring smuggled 626kg of drugs from Cambodia into Vietnam between March 2018 and November 2022, the paper said, citing the court ruling.
The eight members not sentenced to die were given jail terms ranging from 20 years to life, after a four-day trial in Ho Chi Minh City.
The court said the case involved a particularly serious cross-border drug-trafficking operation over a long period of time.
The suspects used social media networks such as Signal, adopting nicknames like “Colombia” and “Mosscau” or “Mosscau Russia” to avoid detection.
To ensure secrecy in their operations, the network used messaging app Signal and phone numbers from the United States or Cambodia to communicate about the drug transactions.
The 67-year-old Oanh Ha was given amnesty in 2009 from a previous 20-year jail sentence on drug-trafficking charges.
She was jailed several times later for different or similar crimes. — AFP
