Vietnamese robber hid for 20 years as policeman

HANOI (Reuters) - A convicted Vietnamese robber who escaped from prison 20 years ago chose a sly way to hide from the law -- inside the police force and as a member of the ruling Communist Party.

A police-run newspaper reported on Friday that Ngo Thanh Tam, 51, was re-arrested on Tuesday, two decades after joining the police under a false identity in the Central Highlands province of Dak Nong.

The An Ninh Thu Do (Capital Security) newspaper described Tam as a "dangerous criminal" on the national wanted list. After his arrest he was purged from the party, which he joined in June.

It was unclear how Tam's real identity was discovered.

Tam was sentenced to four years in jail in 1984 for a series of robberies, but he escaped from prison in 1986, the newspaper said. In 2003 Tam was promoted to police chief of Dak Ru commune.

He had also been elected to the Dakru People's Council for the 2004-2009 tenure.

Interesting. The government needs to start fingerprinting the criminal element, and find ways to make personal documention tamper-proof. The government also needs to cut down on the number of documents it requires from each citizen, because every additional document is a document that is vulnerable to fakery. At the moment, we do have a real security issue on our hands.

It's interesting that the newspaper which reports this case is one of the most conservative newspaper in VN. This kind of newspaper that people use to cleanning up their a--hole.

Four Vietnamese policemen have been detained for receiving bribes from local drug retailers in the country's Hanoi capital to abet their activities, local newspaper People reported Friday.


The policemen, including two from the Drug Crimes Investigation Bureau under the Hanoi Police and two from the police force of the city's Hoang Mai district, were arrested on Thursday for the charge of sheltering a drug-selling point and disclosing information about drug investigation process to the drug sellers. The point in Ha Ba Trung district served over 1,000 addicts a day.

Late last year, seven other local policemen were detained in a similar case. Each of them received 300,000-500,000 Vietnamese dong (VND) (18.9-31.4 U.S. dollars) from some drug dealers in Hai Ba Trung district each day to abet their activities.

The number of drug addicts in Vietnam surged 56.8 percent to 158,428 in 2005 from 101,036 in 2000, according to a recent national conference on the issue.

Vietnam, which has targeted to become a drug-free country by 2015, annually spends estimated 320 billion VND (20.1 million dollars) on detoxification activities.