VIETNAM TO FREE GRANDMOTHER

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."

The family has not been given a date yet. "It could be next week, next
month or Sept. 2, at the latest," Trung Le said.

Le's grandmother, Tran Thi Cam, has been kept at the Thanh Xuan
detention camp outside Hanoi for the past four years, spending her
days weeping and avoiding the rats, which her grandson says are large
as cats.

Tran's family got the news about her upcoming release in a telephone
call late yesterday from Cecile Latour, Canada's ambassador to Vietnam.

"We were so happy. We were all crying," said Le, who led a prayer for
his mother at a shrine in his grandfather's Hanoi home.

Tran has been held there since she and her daughter Nguyen Thi Hiep
were arrested at Hanoi's Noi Bai airport on April 25, 1996, after they
were caught carrying 5.4 kilos of heroin hidden in decorative
lacquered panels.

The women claimed they were simply carrying the panels back to Canada
for a friend, and didn't know drugs had been secreted in the panels.

But their pleas of innocence were ignored by a Hanoi court and, last
April 25, Nguyen, 43, was bound, gagged and secretly executed by a
firing squad.

Now the family is hoping Toronto police can exonerate the two women as
innocent dupes.

"We want to do the right thing. We want to make it clear to people
that our mother and grandmother are innocent," Le said. "We want
people to understand the circumstances, why they carried the panels."

Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy said in an interview yesterday
the Vietnamese government reacted to an "extraordinary set of
measures" taken by Canada after Nguyen's secret execution.

Punitive measures taken by Canada included the withdrawal of our
ambassador, the cancellation of a program to help Vietnam gain
admission into the World Trade Organization, and boycotting the 25th
anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

"Clearly, I think the message got through," Axworthy
said.

Tran's family had met with Vietnamese officials and a representative
of the Canadian embassy just hours earlier to discuss plans to move
Nguyen's body from the execution grounds to a Hanoi cemetery in
accordance with the wishes of Nguyen's father Nguyen Cong.

When Tran's family visits on Saturday they plan to let her son-in-law
Tran Hieu, Nguyen's husband, give her the news of her early release.

The elderly woman, who still doesn't know her daughter has been
executed, won't be told of her death until she's released, her son
Nguyen Hung, 36, of Brampton, said in a telephone interview from Hanoi
yesterday.

Although Axworthy said he would prefer to see the woman released
earlier, he noted a general amnesty is set for Sept. 2 in Vietnam,
adding "we'll take that as it is."

But he said he's already instructed Latour to work for an earlier
release.