HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- Police searched Saturday for 101 drug addicts still at large from a group of 369 who escaped from a drug rehabilitation center in southern Vietnam.

The escape on Thursday was the third mass breakout from the same drug rehabilitation center in less than seven months.

It was triggered by the government's decision to extend the time drug addicts must stay in mandatory rehabilitation programs to at least one year, up from the previous three months, said an official at the center who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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HANOI, Vietnam- A Taiwanese man and his Vietnamese associate were executed by a firing squad in southern Vietnam for producing illegal drugs, a court official said Wednesday.

Chen Chi Tien, 48, and Tram Huy, a Vietnamese of Chinese origin, were executed in Ho Chi Minh City on Tuesday, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Thanh Nien (Young People) newspaper reported that Chen came to Vietnam in 1989 as a businessman.

In 1994, he rented land to set up a farm on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, but used the facility to produce illegal drugs, the newspaper said.

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HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - The number of drug addicts with police records rose by more than 10 percent last year despite a government goal of reducing the number of addicts by 10 percent to 20 percent a year over the next five years, state-controlled media reported Saturday.

The Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper quoted Vice Minister of Public Security Le The Tiem as saying the increase included a larger number of state employees.

"Drug abuse has begun to spread to civil servants and state offices and there is a close connection between drug-related crimes ... and organized crime," he said.

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Drug Users, Prostitutes Forced Into Program Designed To Stem HIV Despite High Relapse

BA VI, VIETNAM -- This is the second time Dang Thuy Quynh has been sent to this government rehabilitation camp for prostitutes and drug users. This time, she says she will ask to stay longer when her one-year term ends.

"I was a drug addict, and I'm afraid if I go back to the city it will be very easy to become addicted again," the 20-year-old said.

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A court in central Vietnam began a trial Monday of 17 people charged with smuggling and selling heroin from neighboring Laos, the chief judge said.

The trial in the central province of Ha Tinh attracted several hundred people who followed the proceedings over loudspeakers outside of the courtroom, said Nguyen Tri Tue, chief judge of the Ha Tinh provincial People's Court.

The defendants told police they smuggled a total of 15.4 pounds of heroin from neighboring Laos on 11 occasions between March 1998 until they were arrested last February, he said.

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Vietnamese courts sentenced 55 people to death last year on drug-related charges, state-controlled media reported Friday.

Fifty-nine other people were given life sentences for drug offenses and 2,241 others received jail terms ranging from seven to 20 years, the official Vietnam News Agency said. No comparative figures were provided for previous years.

In all, 5,948 drug-related cases were brought to trial last year, VNA said.

Officials detected 12,811 drug-related cases involving 21,103 suspects, an increase of 24.4 percent and 8.2 percent, respectively, from the previous year, according to VNA.

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HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- Vietnamese police are searching for 37 drug addicts still at large from a group of 142 who escaped from a drug rehabilitation center in southern Vietnam, in the second massive breakout from the same center in less than a month, an official said Friday.

The inmates climbed the center's two-meter (6.5 foot) wall while 12 guards were busy distributing meals to other inmates, said the official of the center in Can Tho province, 200 kilometers (125 miles) south of Ho Chi Minh City.

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Drug Raves, Orgies Shock Officials

HANOI, Vietnam - Late on a Thursday night, a prostitute on a rickety bicycle wears white plastic sandals and green-and-yellow striped pajamas. She pedals up to two American men standing outside the old "Hanoi Hilton" prison, sniffes and says, "You want boom-boom?"

The men agree and pay the woman $40, which includes a bribe for the night watchman, then they duck into the prison - now a museum - to have sex in a room where U.S. pilots were held and tortured during the Vietnam War.

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Cases Of HIV And AIDS Rising With Trade In Sex And Drugs

HANOI -- It was late on a Thursday night, and the prostitute on the rickety bicycle was wearing white plastic sandals and green-and-yellow striped pajamas. She pedaled up to two American men standing outside the old "Hanoi Hilton" prison, smiled and said, "You want boom-boom?"

The men agreed. They paid the woman $40, which included a bribe for the night watchman, then ducked into the prison -- which now houses a museum -- to have sex in a room where U.S. pilots were held and tortured during the Vietnam War.

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HANOI, Vietnam -- A court in northern Vietnam has finally sent a 91-year-old woman to jail after she was convicted repeatedly of drug dealing, police said Saturday.

Courts in Thai Binh province had convicted Pham Thi Ngoc eight times in the past four years, but she remained free and unrepentant, police in Quang Trung precinct said. Ngoc received sentences ranging from two to 20 years, but the courts were reluctant to send her to jail because of her advanced age.

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Hanoi, Vietnam -- A Vietnamese court has sentenced to death seven defendants after a trial of 23 people accused of drug trafficking and circulating counterfeit U.S. dollars, the official news media reported Saturday.

The Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper said the court also handed out nine life sentences and jail terms of between 10 and 20 years to another seven defendants, including two women.

The 23 people were found guilty of trafficking more than 91 packages of heroin, each weighing 75 pounds; 4.4 pounds of opium and counterfeit dollars with a face value of $92,200.

Trafficking 3.3 ounces of heroin is punishable by death or life imprisonment.

Execution in Vietnam is by firing squad.

The trial had started Monday in the central province of Ha Tinh, about 250 miles south of Hanoi.

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HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- A court in central Vietnam on Friday convicted 23 people on drug trafficking charges and sentenced seven to death in the country's second-largest illegal drug case, the chief judge said.

Nine other defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment and the remaining seven received jail terms ranging from 10 years to 20 years, said Nguyen Tri Tue, chief judge of the Ha Tinh provincial People's Court.

After a five-day trial, the court found the defendants guilty of trafficking 32.5 kilograms (71 pounds) of heroin and 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of opium from neighboring Laos to Vietnam from 1996 until they were arrested in late 1999.

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A court in the commercial capital of Ho Chi Minh City sentenced a US national, also wanted by Belgian police, to death for heroin trafficking, just days after US President Bill Clinton's landmark visit, the official media reported Saturday.

The court found Vietnamese-born Nguyen Manh Cuong, alias Bui Huu Tai, who fled to the United States in 1978 at the age of 10, guilty of "drug trafficking and storing and organizing the use of drugs," official dailies said.

The court convicted Tai of trafficking 1.6 kilograms (three and a half pounds) of heroin, most of which he sold to a Japanese dealer, the city's Saigon Giaiphong daily said.

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HANOI, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Prosecutors in Vietnam have proposed five death sentences in a trial of 28 people, 11 of them women, accused of involvement in heroin trafficking, official media reported on Thursday.

Hanoi's police newspaper An Ninh Thu Do (Capital Security) said prosecutors were seeking the death sentence for one of the women defendents and were also calling for six life sentences.

The Hanoi People's Court began hearing the case on Monday. Sentences are due to be announced on December 1 but in communist-ruled Vietnam these rarely differ from what prosecutors have sought.

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A frail 74-year-old woman is set to be free as early as today to return from Vietnam to Canada, the country that has been her home since shortly after the Communist regime took over her native South Vietnam in 1975.

Tran Thi Cam, a Canadian citizen, has spent more than four years in a Hanoi cell after a seriously flawed trial in which she was found guilty of drug trafficking. She has yet to be formally told that her 43-year-old daughter, Nguyen Thi Hiep, also a Canadian citizen, was executed on the same charges in April, despite Ottawa's pleas to the Vietnamese government to examine Toronto police evidence that suggested the pair's innocence.

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Hanoi - Vietnam has freed the elderly mother of a Vietnamese-Canadian woman it executed earlier this year for heroin trafficking, part of a mass amnesty for 10,693 convicts, 61 of them foreigners.

Tran Thi Cam, 74, of Brampton, Ont., was among 263 people freed Friday from Thanh Xuan, a prison set in rice fields west of Hanoi, under the amnesty to mark the communist state's 55th independence day that falls on Saturday.

She had spent more than four years in jail for after being arrested at Hanoi airport in April 1996 and accused of trying to smuggle 5.45 kilograms of heroin on to a flight to Hong Kong.

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Unaware Of Daughter's Execution

A Brampton woman was to be freed from her Vietnamese prison today, still unaware that her daughter was executed four months ago.

As the family of 74-year-old Tran Thi Cam holds a planned reunion at an amnesty celebration at her Thanh Xuan jail this afternoon, they will also be mourning the unexpected execution in April of Nguyen Thi Hiep.

"I feel happy and sad and all mixed up," said Tran Hieu, 56, Nguyen's husband. Like the rest of her family, he won't tell his mother-in-law about the execution because he thinks the news would kill her.

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Woman Executed In April

The body of a Canadian woman whose execution by firing squad in Vietnam led to a diplomatic row between Ottawa and Hanoi has been quietly returned to her family.

This suggests that Vietnam is now serious about its promise to release the woman's 74-year-old mother from prison in a general amnesty next week.

Nguyen Thi Hiep, a 44-year-old Toronto seamstress, was shot in April after a conviction for drug smuggling. Her mother, Tran Thi Cam, a landed immigrant in Canada, was given a sentence of life in prison for the same incident.

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Family Thanks Ottawa For Help Gaining Amnesty

The family of a 74-year-old grandmother imprisoned in Vietnam for the past four years on a drug smuggling conviction is overjoyed that pressure by the Canadian government has led to a promise of amnesty.

"We have great news," grandson Trung Le, 26, said in a telephone interview from Hanoi. "My grandmother will be set free. It is our big hope, our wishes come true," he said yesterday.

"We would like to thank the Canadian government for helping us."

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Hopes To Rebury Nguyen's Body, Free Her Mother

They brought 200 red rosebuds to cover the makeshift grave of a Canadian executed on the killing grounds of a Hanoi prison for drug smuggling.

Nguyen Thi Hiep's family had come halfway around the world to pay respects. They wept as they waded waist-deep into the killing ground - temporarily flooded - where the Toronto woman was shot, to place flowers on her shallow grave.

Nguyen, 43, is the first Canadian known to have been executed on drug smuggling charges. Her body lies close to the spot where she was bound, gagged and blindfolded before facing a firing squad at dawn, Hanoi time, on April 25.

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