On December 7, customs officers at Hanoi’s Noi Bai International Airport detained a Filipino national for bringing 3.6kg of cocaine into Vietnam.

The foreign man, Kamacho Sillo Emmanul, arrived at the airport on Saturday at noon on a flight from Sao Paulo, Brazil, with a transfer in Singapore. He was arrested after customs officers found 18 packs of a white crystalline powder stashed in stockings packed in his luggage. The total weight of the packs is 3.6 kilograms.  A test conducted later confirmed that the substance is cocaine. Customs has handed the foreigner and the cocaine over to Hanoi’s anti-drug police for investigation. Many drugs traffickers, both Vietnamese and foreigners, have recently been caught with drugs at airports throughout the country.  One of the most recent cases occurred on November 26 at Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhat Airport, where customs officers caught a 31-year-old Vietnamese woman hiding 2 kilograms of methamphetamine in her suitcase when she arrived at the airport.   On October 26, 2013, custom officers of the same airport caught two Australian nationals carrying 3.5 kilograms of heroin hidden inside their luggage when they arrived at the airport. Under Vietnam’s Penal Code, those who are convicted of smuggling more than 2.5 kilograms of methamphetamine are given the death sentence.

Capital punishment is also applied to those who are indicted for producing or selling 100 grams of heroin or 300 grams of other illegal narcotics. A Ho Chi Minh City court on August 19, 2013 sentenced a 31-year-old Nigerian man, Ejiogu Benjamin Ikechukwu, to death for smuggling more than 3.4 kg of methamphetamine from Qatar to Vietnam in June 2012.