Ho Chi Minh City police have busted a large ring comprising African-born expatriates who had deceived a series of naïve Vietnamese students and poor local women into transporting drugs across nations.

Some have been rescued and guided to defect from the transnational drug ring after they were found carrying drugs abroad.

A return from hell

Senior Lieutenant Colonel Phung Van Dang recalled a rescue mission in 2012 when a female victim was discovered carrying drugs abroad.

When policemen were questioning a Vietnamese woman, Tran Thi Phuong Trinh, who is a henchman of the African ring, her mobile phone rang constantly.

She confessed that the caller was her victim who had been tricked into carrying clothes abroad. The victim did not know it was drugs.

“The victim was really innocent. If we had let her complete her deed of transporting drugs and she got caught in any country, she would have been hanged or at least served life jail terms.

“We had to save her and other victims.

“It was the words from the heart that urged us to save the victims at any cost,” Sr. Lt. Col. Dang recalled.

Questioning Trinh, police found out that the victim was NTH who was residing in Ho Chi Minh City. She was given two suitcases containing several kilograms of drugs by an African drug ring in Thailand.

At the moment Trinh was nabbed, NTH received the banned substance and was looking for a way to get on a bus to enter Malaysia.

With professional judgment, policemen predicted that NTH was under secret supervision by henchmen of the African drug ring, which was willing to kill the victim if she showed signs of abandoning the cargo or reporting to local authorities.

Policemen used Trinh’s phone to inform NTH that they were her ‘superiors’ tasked with replacing Trinh in Thailand for organizing the job.

After NTH briefed her ‘superiors’ on her location, they asked her to go to a crowded place, leave the suitcases in front of a local house, and go into a restroom.

Then, NTH was asked to quickly join the crowd, get on a tuk tuk, a common vehicle of public transport in Thailand, and sneak into a nearby hotel.

Later, Vietnamese police were informed that their Thai colleagues had discovered and checked the suitcases when their African ‘supervisors’ were wandering around, and that NTH had escaped from them.

At the hotel, Vietnamese police asked NTH to hand over her mobile phone to hotel staff and give the police the address of the victim. Then NTH was advised of the route to take by bus to the border of Thailand and Cambodia.

Agents of Vietnamese police picked her up there and took her to Vietnam.

Only when she arrived at the Moc Bai border checkpoint in southern Vietnam did NTH believe that she was doing everything for a drug ring. On seeing Vietnamese police vehicles, she burst into loud cries.

Policemen gently explained to her that her suitcases had drugs inside and because she had abandoned them in Thailand, she did not violate any Vietnamese laws and thus was free from any charge.

Days after, NTH and her family went back to the police station to thank them, saying “You brought me back from hell.”

An arrest

In the early days of 2011 when Ho Chi Minh City police were looking into a drug trafficking ring from Cambodia to Vietnam, they were suddenly offered help by a young woman who volunteered to surrender to them and report a case she knew.

Most women who were tricked into carrying drugs for the ring were paid up to US$1,000 each for a trip, she said. But the women did not know they were transporting drugs, the woman added.

The young woman, named NHM, confessed that she had carried drugs for her sister many times. One day, she suspected she was carrying drugs and so reported it to police, according to Major Mai Van Linh, vice head of police department PC47, in charge of drug investigations.

NHM even admitted she had just given a suitcase of drugs to an African man minutes before her confession.

She was disguised and brought back to the site she had handed over the suitcase with the support of secret agents.

The location was on Go Dau Street in Tan Quy Ward of Tan Phu District in Ho Chi Minh City. The area had many clothing shops run by Africans and was under close watch by secret policemen.

NHM identified the man she had met not long before when he was about to get on a motorbike with a suitcase. Secret agents in different roles accessed the suspect out of suspicion.

After finding out that a date to deliver the suitcase was changed and the suspect was keeping it, policemen were allowed to act.

The man was suddenly nabbed while leaving a coffee shop on Go Dau Street without any protest.

His name is Johnson Ndubueze Duru, a Nigerian. He sold clothes but had no stable residence in Ho Chi Minh City.

From his testimonies, police arrested another Nigerian, Richard Maximus Chikeluba.

They colluded with many other Africans and hired poor locals before tricking them into carrying drugs.