VIETNAM SET TO FREE WOMAN

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.

"I will keep that secret as long as I can," Tran said in a telephone
interview from Hanoi, translated by his stepson Trung Le. "I will break the
news to her gradually that her daughter is dead."

Tran Thi Cam, a Canadian landed immigrant, is one of 10,408 prisoners held
in Vietnamese prisons to be released in honour of Vietnam's National Day
Sept. 2.

Nguyen and her mother had said they were innocent when they were caught
carrying 5.4 kilos of heroin in decorative lacquered panels at Hanoi's Noi
Bai airport on April 25, 1996.

The 43-year-old Toronto seamstress is the only Canadian ever to be executed
on drug charges anywhere. She faced the firing squad April 25.

Meanwhile, officials in Ottawa are still trying to determine what, if
anything, they could have done to prevent Nguyen's execution, after
learning from The Star yesterday that her husband made two frantic phone
calls to a translator at the Canadian embassy in Hanoi on April 24.

Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy has asked for an accounting in "a
review of all written and oral communications which took place in the hours
leading up to her death," spokesperson Reynald Doiron said.