Vietnamese 'cheated' by mediums

Many are desperate to find their relatives remains

By Owen Bennett-Jones in Hanoi

In Vietnam, people trying to trace relatives who went missing during the Vietnam war have complained that they are being tricked out of money by fake mediums.

Toll of Vietnam war

Three million Vietnamese people killed

300,000 Vietnamese never found

1,498 US troops missing in action

The mediums claim their powers of extra-sensory perception enable them to locate places where Vietnamese soldiers went missing in action.

The mediums say they can conjure up the spirits of the dead.

Unscrupulous

But the Vietnam Veterans' Association in Hanoi says it has received many complaints about the practice.

It claims the mediums are increasingly well-organised and utterly unscrupulous.

The US also spends millions annually locating troops missing in action

According to a local newspaper, one family was led to a site which turned out to contain deliberately hidden animal bones, rather than human remains.

Another man was told his younger brother had been buried in a graveyard which, it turned out, never even existed.

In other cases, the mediums simply direct relatives to battlefields, where there was fierce fighting and where many human remains are still in the ground.

Families desperate

Families can pay hundreds of dollars for the spurious information.

The fact that they fall for the mediums' tricks is a reflection of just how desperate they are to find their relatives' remains.

Many Vietnamese practise ancestor worship.

It is widely believed that if the location of a body is not known, then the dead person's spirit will not find anywhere to settle in the afterlife.

The American Government is also trying to find its own troops, which went missing in action.

Each year it spends tens of millions of dollars on investigations and excavations to locate the 1,498 Americans still listed as missing in action in Vietnam.