'THEY SHOULD HAVE KILLED ME, NOT HER'

Tran Thi Cam thought she could help her family by carrying lacquered
panels back to Canada for a price. But it was a plan that went
horribly wrong.

"I am an old woman with no job. I thought with the $100 U.S. I was
given I could buy presents for the family," she said in an interview
last night translated by her son Nguyen Hung at his Brampton home.

Tran, a landed immigrant, arrived safely back in Canada about 1 a.m.
yesterday after being released earlier this month from a four-year
ordeal in a Vietnamese prison where cat-sized rats scurried around her
cell at night.

She and her daughter Nguyen Thi Hiep were arrested on heroin smuggling
charges. Nguyen, a Toronto seamstress and Canadian citizen was
executed in Vietnam on April 25.

"My daughter never knew about the paintings," she said.

"Nobody in the house knew. I never told anybody. I wanted it to be a
surprise," Tran said, tears welling in her eyes.

The 74-year-old grandmother said that she was unaware the panels
contained 5.4 kilograms of heroin.

On April 25, 1996, when Tran and her daughter attempted to return to
Canada from Vietnam after a family visit, they were arrested at the
Hanoi airport.

Tran's heart is torn by the knowledge her 43-year-old daughter is
buried in Hanoi.

"Why did the Vietnamese government have to kill her? They should have
killed me, not her. I was the one who carried the paintings," Tran
said.

She says she was tricked by the man who asked her to carry the
paintings. "I am innocent. . . . That guy lied to me," said Tran,
tired from her 20-hour journey.

She said a man she'd never met before came up to her on a Hanoi street
corner and asked her to carry the panels.

"He said he knew me. He said he knew my family," she said.

"So I accepted to carry the panels. He gave me $100 (U.S.) to carry
the panels."

Within half an hour another man appeared at the home where she was
staying with the package of panels.

Tran has a message for the man she says tricked her.

"How could you do this to us? It cost me my daughter's life and my
life as well," a tearful Tran told media gathered at Pearson airport
where her family was waiting. Officials from immigration and foreign
affairs escorted her and grandson, Trung Le, 26, off the plane first.

Tran didn't know about her daughter's execution for nearly five
months, because her family thought the news would kill her.

"She was devastated when we told her," said her grandson Tu Le, 22, of
Brampton.

Toronto police also would like to talk to the man who gave Tran the
panels, said Detective Constable John Green of the special
investigations services heroin squad.

Green and Superintendent Rocky Cleveland, head of intelligence for
Toronto police, went to Vietnam in August to meet with authorities.
They were hoping to get answers and share intelligence with Nguyen's
interrogators.

The officers asked to see Thang, the (Hanoi) man who brought the
panels to the women but they (the police) said he was
unavailable.

Green said he had also hoped to interview a Hanoi shoemaker called
Hien. "He was supposed to be the man who originally approached Nguyen
(about the panels)."

But Hien had been arrested in 1997 on heroin offences not related to
Nguyen's charges and had been executed.

Toronto police believe Tran and her daughter may have been
unsuspecting drug couriers duped by an international drug ring,
Superintendent Ron Taverner of special investigations services has
said.

On April 19, 1996, just six days before Tran and her daughter were
arrested, another Vietnamese-born Toronto seamstress was arrested at
Pearson for smuggling heroin in similar panels. She was cleared when
police discovered she had been duped.

Police say the same man - Phu Hoa of Mississauga - links the two cases
in a drug smuggling operation between Vietnam and Toronto in which
innocent women were unwittingly used to carry drugs.

Both heroin shipments had been destined for Phu, who is now serving 14
years in a Canadian prison for drug trafficking.

When Nguyen and her family came to Canada in 1985 as refugees they
opened a Vietnamese restaurant in Montreal. Before moving to Toronto
in 1995 they lived at Phu's Mississauga home before finding an apartment.

But Nguyen's husband Tran Hieu, 56, told The Star in an interview from
Hanoi he did not know Phu, he knew his brother and that the two had
played soccer together for the Vietnamese team.