■VIETNAM
Pot plant graveyard busted
Police have detained two custodians who were about to harvest their first crop of cannabis, a source of drugs like hashish and marijuana, from a cemetery in Hanoi, a state-run newspaper reported yesterday. Police took in the head of the caretaker team at the cemetery in the outer district of Hoang Mai, after the authorities found cannabis plants grown on a 25m² patch, the Vietnam Labor Confederation-run Lao Dong newspaper said.■INDONESIA
Prosecutors seek five years
Prosecutors sought a five-year jail term yesterday for a businesswoman accused of bribing an investigator to the tune of US$660,000 to drop a major embezzlement case. Chief prosecutor Sarjono Turin said Artalyta Suryani had been “convincingly” shown to have bribed Urip Tri Gunawan, a senior prosecutor in the attorney general’s office who was in charge of the embezzlement probe. Suryani allegedly bribed Gunawan to drop his investigation into Sjamsul Nursalim, who is accused of embezzling some US$3 billion in emergency bail-out loans to his bank during the Asian financial crisis in 1998.
■MALAYSIA
Hindus take body to court
A Hindu family yesterday vowed to fight Islamic authorities over the rights to the body of their relative whom a religious court has declared to be Muslim. In the nation’s latest dispute over Islamic conversion, the family of Elangesvaran Benedict, who committed suicide last month, said he remained a Hindu and should be buried according to the rites of the religion. Islamic authorities last Friday secured an order in the Sharia religious court — where the family was not represented — that said he had converted to the religion.
■HONG KONG
Smuggling tunnel unearthed
Authorities said on Sunday they had cracked a cross-border smuggling network that ferried electronic goods to China through a 600m tunnel. “It is the first of its kind to have been detected,” the city’s customs department said in a statement, adding that 12 people had been arrested in connection with the operation. Police and customs officers in the former British colony on Friday discovered the opening of the tunnel in Ta Kwu Lin, near the border with the southern boomtown of Shenzhen. Goods were smuggled through the tunnel — which measured just 15cm in diameter — using an elaborate system of fiber-optic cables and electronic pulleys, a spokesman for the customs department said. He estimated that as much as HK$10 million (US$1.28 million) in electronic goods could be smuggled through the tunnel each night. Goods included mobile phones, computer motherboards and hard disk drives.
■JAPAN
Executions hit record high
The justice minister, dubbed the “grim reaper” for ordering a record number of executions, has defended the death penalty as “civilized” but said he loses sleep over signing the orders. Thirteen people have been hanged in Japan since Kunio Hatoyama took office in August, a record high for the period. Japan lifted a de facto moratorium on executions in 1993. “This is civilization,” Hatoyama said in an interview published yesterday in the Shukan Post weekly. The death penalty enjoys wide public support in Japan, which has one of the world’s lowest crime rates.
■VIETNAM
Shooter kills two, self
Two people were killed and another person was injured in the north over the weekend in the country’s second deadly shooting spree in less than a month, a police officer said yesterday. Nguyen Van Hoan, 46, shot dead a 64-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man with a shotgun on Saturday night, said Hoang Anh, chief of the city’s police department. The shooting took place in a small restaurant in Lang Son City, 135km northwest of Hanoi. Hoan also shot and injured Phuong Van Truong, 23, at the restaurant and then killed himself a few hours later on a hill near the city, the police officer said.
RSS