Kant Nguyen, 37, was sentenced by a Ho Chi Minh City court on Tuesday for trafficking 219 grams of the drug on an Australia-bound flight from the city last May, the police-run Cong An Nhan Dan daily said.
The Vietnam Airlines flight returned for an emergency landing and doctors later found he had been poisoned after one of the heroin packages in his digestive system had burst open, reports said. Nguyen told the court during the one-day trial that he was hired for $20,000 to smuggle the drugs from Vietnam to Australia, it said, according to the Associated Press."
Vietnam's proximity to Burma and Laos, the second and third largest opium producers after Afghanistan, and its porous borders and long coastline have made it a major heroin transit country.
Under communist Vietnam's tough anti-drug laws, possessing, selling and trafficking more than 600 grams of heroin or 20 kilograms of opium carries life in prison or the death penalty.The Vietnamese-Australian man received a 20-year jail term for drug trafficking after he was caught last year with 75 heroin-filled plastic bags inside his body, Vietnamese media has reported.
Kant Nguyen, 37, was sentenced by a Ho Chi Minh City court on Tuesday for trafficking 219 grams of the drug on an Australia-bound flight from the city last May, the police-run Cong An Nhan Dan daily said.
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