TORONTO WOMAN EXECUTED DESPITE PLEAS TO VIETNAM

Death By Firing Squad

'My father said the Vietnamese government treated my mother like a puppet.
He's very angry. There's not much we can do.'

Trung Le, son of Nguyen Thi Hiep

Canadian officials are outraged over the secret execution of a Toronto
woman jailed in Vietnam despite frantic international efforts to save her life.

Nguyen Thi Hiep, 42, who was convicted in a Hanoi court in March, 1997, of
smuggling 5.4 kilograms of heroin, was shot by a firing squad at dawn Monday.

The death of Nguyen, the only Canadian known to have been executed anywhere
in the world on a drug-related charge, could chill relations between Canada
and Vietnam, Canadian officials said yesterday.

In a statement released in Ottawa, Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy
said the execution of the Canadian citizen "has come as a shock."

Up to the day of her execution, Toronto police had been investigating
whether Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam and became a Canadian citizen in
1982, was being used as an unsuspecting mule by an organized drug ring.

When Nguyen was marched in front of the firing squad, she was "gagged and
blindfolded . . . continuing to maintain her innocence right up to the end"
said a Canadian foreign affairs official.

"She refused to sign a statement of guilt," Reynald Doiron, spokesperson
for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in Ottawa,
said yesterday.

Several minutes after the execution, a prison official informed Nguyen's
husband, who lives in Hanoi, of her death, Doiron said.

"The execution took place in absolute secrecy," he said. "The family was
not permitted to see her."

Last night, Nguyen's family here in Canada gathered to share their grief.

"Everybody is devastated," Nguyen's oldest son, Tu Le, a 21-year-old
musician, said from his uncle's home near Brampton.

The family learned of Nguyen's death when her husband phoned from Hanoi
yesterday at 2 p.m. to break the news, said Nguyen's oldest son, Trung Le, 26.

"My father said the Vietnamese government treated my mother like a puppet.
He's very angry," Trung Le said.

"There's not much we can do," he added as the family met to remember Nguyen.

"We're saying prayers for my mother tonight," said Tu Le.

Yesterday afternoon in Ottawa, foreign affairs officials tersely demanded a
30-minute meeting with Vietnamese ambassador Trinh Thanh.

Joseph Caron, assistant deputy minister for Asia Pacific and Africa, and
Cecile Latour, Canada's ambassador to Vietnam, presented Trinh with a
diplomatic note of protest, demanding a formal explanation for the
execution. Trinh said he would try to return with a reply.

If Canada is not satisfied with Vietnam's explanation for the execution,
relations between the two countries could be affected, Doiron said.

"Depending on the explanation, bilateral relations will be examined,"
Doiron said.

Canadian authorities want to know why the Vietnamese government didn't wait
to examine a 50-page document prepared by Detective Carl Noll and Detective
Constable John Green of the Toronto police heroin unit. They had
investigated the international drug ring that involved Nguyen, Doiron said.

The documents were delivered to the foreign ministry and forwarded to
Vietnamese authorities, police said.

"They carried out the sentence before they told us anything about what was
transferred to them and what the consequences might have been," Doiron said.

The information police provided "needed careful examination in order to
establish whether Mrs. Nguyen may have been duped into transporting drugs
out of Vietnam," Secretary of State Raymond Chan said in a statement issued
yesterday.

Toronto police said they were mystified by the sudden timing of the execution.

"We were in the process of conducting a joint investigation with Vietnamese
officials regarding the Nguyen case when she was executed," said Noll.

Three other men sentenced in a Toronto court almost a year ago as
ringleaders in the organization are serving time and awaiting release on
parole.

Police believe the drugs Nguyen was concealing were destined for
distribution and sale by these men, Noll said.

In the three years until her execution, Nguyen had been shackled in a
squalid rat-infested jail cell while international appeals from Prime
Minister Jean Chretien, Axworthy, U.S. President Bill Clinton, Rev. Jesse
Jackson, former boxing great Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, Amnesty
International, the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted and the
woman's family appealed for clemency - but all were ignored.

While a court in Hanoi sentenced Nguyen to die, her 74-year-old mother Tran
Thi Cam was sentenced to life in prison.

Nguyen and her mother told the Hanoi court during their trial in March,
1997, that they were unaware that 5.4 kilograms of heroin was concealed in
Oriental art panels they were carrying at Hanoi's Noi Bai Airport.

Now the family is faced with the task of working out how they'll bring her
body home.

"We want to have her body brought back to Canada," Nguyen's oldest son
Trung Le said last night. "According to our culture she must be buried near
where we live."

Trung Le recently returned from visiting his grandmother in a Vietnam prison.

"Our family doesn't want to let her know her daughter is dead . . . for at
least a couple of months," he said.

"She's very sick. We don't want to tell her for at least two more months,"
Le said.

Chretien, who was out of town attending the funeral of his mother-in-law,
was not available for comment.

Axworthy was in Africa and also unavailable for comment. But his office
released a statement expressing his shock.

"I am deeply disappointed that the government of Vietnam did not accept our
request for executive clemency and commutation of the death sentence
imposed on Mrs. Nguyen," Axworthy said.

Rubin Carter, the famed American boxer wrongly sent to death row in New
Jersey, says Nguyen was executed before a delegation consisting of himself,
Rev. Jesse Jackson, and several federal prosecutors and RCMP investigators
could go to Vietnam for a pre-arranged visit. He said they had conclusive
proof to offer to the Vietnamese authorities that Nguyen was innocent.

"We were going to convince the president of Vietnam, as well as the courts
of Vietnam, that they had the wrong people, and that the mother and
daughter were dupes," said Carter, executive director of the Toronto-based
Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted.

"But before we were able to do that they had executed the woman," Carter added.

Carter said that on Dec. 3, he spent four hours discussing Nguyen's
predicament in an amphitheatre at the White House after a screening of The
Hurricane, the recently released movie about his own struggle for justice.

"Clinton was appalled, and eventually did everything that he had promised
to do," Carter added. "He was able to postpone the execution, but he
couldn't stop it."

With files from Allan Thompson and Harold Levy