Vietnamese policeman gets death for trafficking

A court in central Vietnam has sentenced a former police officer to death for heroin trafficking.

He is Le Van Luan, a lieutenant-colonel and deputy head of the police intelligence unit in the central province of Nghe An.

He was found guilty of trafficking in nearly seven-hundred grams of heroin from Laos. Trafficking in one-hundred grams or more of heroin is punishable by death or life imprisonment. At least fifty people have been sentenced to death this year and two-thousand arrested for drug-related offences.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service