A Vietnamese couple have been jailed for 23 years each for torturing their 14-year-old domestic helper with boiling water, chemicals and pliers, a court official said yesterday.
The trial on Tuesday of Huynh Thanh Giang, 30 and his wife Ma Ngoc Thom, 33, attracted thousands of people from the Mekong Delta province of Ca Mau, Lam Thanh Quang of the provincial court said.
The shrimp-farming couple were arrested in April for allegedly torturing the boy by breaking his teeth with pliers, locking him up and forcing him to drink his own urine, state media reported.
The victim told the court that he had also been beaten on the forehead, back and face with a hammer, bamboo and plastic cable.
“I had many injuries on my head. My right chest was burnt by boiling water ... I was even hung and beaten in the sun,” Tuoi Tre newspaper yesterday quoted the boy as saying.
Two teenage employees who helped the couple beat the boy were each sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment, Quang told reporters.
“The boy said he was beaten any time he made a small mistake and even when he did nothing wrong, when the man suddenly became angry at him,” local government official Pham Duc Ly said earlier.
Unlike many court cases in Vietnam, the hearing was held in public, which is known as a “mobile trial.”
“This mobile trial attracted the greatest number of people in the province at least over the past two years,” Quang told reporters.
The case received wide media coverage in the communist state after the boy was reportedly found with injuries to two-thirds of his body.
“After the trial, some people agreed with the sentence, some not, saying that it was still not heavy enough,” Quang said.
The sentence “does not match the crime committed by the two defendants,” Tuoi Tre quoted a local resident, Nguyen Van Be, 59, as saying.
The victim’s mother earlier told state media she had given her son permission to work on the shrimp farm for a monthly wage of 500,000 dong (US$27).
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS