Beating death highlights Vietnam police 'abuse'

It started with a row over a motorbike helmet. Eight days later a 53-year-old man was dead after a beating by Vietnamese police, in a case activists say fits a pattern of brutality in the force.

Trinh Xuan Tung was hit on the neck and left handcuffed despite his appeals to officers about the paralysis seizing his body, according to his family.

US-based Human Rights Watch said the case highlights the "alarming" use of violence among police in Vietnam, where small offences can have tragic consequences.

"There's basically total impunity to abuse people in custody," said Phil Robertson, HRW deputy Asia director. "It's just out of control."

A study by the group last September cited 19 incidents of police brutality, including 15 deaths, that were reported in state-controlled media over the previous year -- often the only way to get information.

Many of the fatal cases involved people who were reportedly held for minor infractions, the watchdog said in its study, which Britain's foreign office this year called "disturbing."

Since then other cases of alleged brutality, including Tung's, have been covered by local media. Robertson says nothing has changed and there appears little appetite for change within the force.

Recounting what he told her before his death, Tung's 21-year-old daughter Trinh Kim Tien said her father took a motorcycle taxi to a Hanoi bus station one afternoon earlier this year, removing his helmet along the way to make a mobile phone call.

Riding without a helmet is illegal, so a policeman confiscated the vehicle and fined the driver 150,000 dong ($7.14), about three days' wages.

But the driver refused to pay, leading to an argument and a scuffle that Tung tried to stop, according to his daughter.

"Then the policeman attacked my father," Tien said.

Tung, who sold birds for a living and "never had any problem with anyone", was beaten on the neck and back before being taken to a police station where his daughter found him with cuffs on his wrists and legs, complaining of paralysis.

"My father said that it hurt and could I please bring him to the hospital because he could not move his arms and legs," she said, adding police initially refused the request.

"They said my father was trying to pretend" and that nobody had done anything to him. He later died in hospital.

-- 'A sort of mafia' --

The US State Department's annual report on human rights in Vietnam cited nine reported deaths in custody during 2010, up from none in 2009 and one in 2008.

"In nearly all cases, police alleged the victim committed suicide," said the report released in April.

In one of the most prominent abuse cases, Nguyen Van Khuong died in police custody after he was stopped for a traffic violation in the northern province of Bac Giang last year.

Thousands gathered to protest the young man's death and an officer was reportedly later sentenced to seven years in prison, an unprecedented punishment for a case of police abuse, said a foreign diplomat who declined to be named.

Every country faces, to some extent, problems among its police but "how you deal with it defines how you deal with human rights in general," he added.

The Ministry of Public Security, which controls the police, did not respond to an interview request but the government has said the law "strictly prohibits illegal use of force while performing public duties."

In Tung's case a policeman is expected to be tried "soon", his daughter said. But there are very few real investigations of police brutality and, even if an officer is detained, the case is often sidelined, according to Robertson.

He blames a symbiotic relationship between police and local authorities in which "fines" from the public are kicked back up to politicians and superior officers.

Vietnamese police are like "a sort of mafia organisation," Robertson said.

"It appears that the Ministry of Public Security is more interested in protecting its own than protecting the people of Vietnam."

Tien has hung banners outside the family home next to a noodle shop, "to show people that my father is innocent".

Even if he were guilty, she said, "he should have been fined, not beaten to death."