Police in Ho Chi Minh City have detained a Vietnamese-American for carrying three heroin cakes weighing 1.1 kg at Tan Son Nhat Airport. Airport customs officers discovered the heroin in the luggage of 40-year-old D. Jason, an American, when he had his luggage checked before boarding a flight to Sydney, Australia, on Tuesday, June 25. Customs officers had noticed D. acting suspiciously, so they decided to search his luggage. He and the heroin were later handed over by airport police to the city’s anti-drug police for investigation. A similar case occurred at the airport on May 21 when customs officers detected and seized 12 heroin cakes from two Vietnamese-Australian women who were preparing to fly to Sydney. P.T.D., 36, and P.T.T.Q, 31, were caught hiding the cakes in their suitcases. The total weight of the heroin cakes was 4.18 kg.

In another case, police in Quang Binh on June 21 caught two Lao men, both from Laos’s Kham Muon Province, carrying  3 kg of Methamphetamine, a kind of synthetic drug, in a Toyota from Laos to Vietnam through the province’s Cha Lo border gate. According to Vietnamese law, anybody convicted of smuggling more than 600 grams of heroin will face the death sentence. Among recent death sentences for drug traffickers was one given by the Tay Ninh Province People’s Court to a Chinese national, Zhu Yin Xiang, 48, on February 6, 2013. On August 16, 2012, local police caught Xiang transporting four heroin cakes weighing over 1.3 kg in total from Cambodia into Vietnam.