Wife confesses to burning journalist to death

Wife confesses to burning journalist to death

Tran Thuy Lieu has confessed to police she herself killed her husband who was a vocal journalist, ending month-long speculations that he was killed for his high-profile reports on underworld thugs and corruption.

At 10:30 pm Sunday, Lieu, 40 came to the police station in Long An province and confessed her unthinkable crime.

According to Lao Dong, Lieu said that she did not want to kill Le Hoang Hung, 51 of Nguoi Lao Dong newspaper but only wanted to “warn” her husband.

She said this stems from domestic conflict arising from her gambling, Lao Dong reported.

She is being arrested pending investigation.

Earlier Sunday, after leaving the police station from a questioning session at around 5 pm, she came home and hugged her two daughters and cried in tears, saying “mother will probably die”.

When her sister asked her why, Lieu admitted she killed her husband.

Lieu’s sister then managed to persuade Lieu to confess. After one hour lying in bed crying, Lieu and her relatives went to the police station and made the confession under the witness of her sister Tran Thi Thuy Loan.

According to VnExpress, Senior Lieutenant Colonel Pham Van Tien, chief investigator said that Lieu is the mastermind but there is one accomplice helping her in the murder.

But as the investigation process is not complete, Tien declined to reveal the name of this accomplice.

VnExpress quoted Loan as saying that prior to her confession, Lieu kneeled down at her husband’s altar and mumbled “please forgive me”.

Loan said that Lieu later attempted to cut her wrist but relatives intervened in time and took her to the police.

Tragedy

On January 19,while he was asleep in his bed on the second floor in Long An, Hung was doused in petrol and set on fire.

He died in hospital 10 days later.

During the time he was conscious in hospital, he would turn away whenever investigators asked him who he thought was the culprit.

Tears reportedly fell down his cheeks.

His wife, Lieu, told police that Hung burst into the room she and their two daughters were sleeping in, covered in flames.

The pillows, mattress and blanket in which he was sleeping were burnt to ashes.

The bed after the fire

Her neighbor and brother climbed into the locked home from an adjoining balcony and put out the inferno on Hung’s bed with a blanket.

Lieu claimed she extinguished the fire covering her husband using a showerhead.

At around 1 a.m., the family called a taxi to their four-story house in a sparsely-populated development in Tan An Town, the capital city of Long An Province, 50 kilometers to the southwest of Ho Chi Minh City.

Hung was rushed to the Long An General Hospital. Two hours later, he was transferred to Cho Ray Hospital in HCMC.

Hung was a father, a Communist Party member, a former soldier in the Vietnamese army and the son of a war martyr. He had also spent the last 32 years of his life as a dogged reporter.

More than 400 people attended his funeral.

Immediately after Hung’s death, papers focus suspicion on underworld thugs exposed by Hung in his high profile reports.

But later suspicion zoomed in on his wife when newspapers started to report that Lieu and Hung had an argument before he was set on fire.

Lieu reportedly implored her husband to sell their house to repay her gambling debts, but he refused. Her total debt was said to be up to VND1 billion ($50,000) from her trips to Cambodian casinos.

In a February 11 interview, Lieu admitted to gambling at casinos in Cambodia in over twenty trips across the border.

On February 15, the Ministry of Public Security dispatched a team to work with investigators in Long An and help facilitate an investigation.

Testing the fire?

Then, it was reported that her neighbor saw Lieu extinguishing a bush fire in her house’s yard on the day her husband was burnt. This prompted speculation that she could have set the bush on fire to 'test' the fire and the damage.

Despite such circumstantial evidence, the crime is hard to believe until Lieu actually came clean.

Even Nguyen Phan Dau, Hung’s friend and colleaque did not believe Lieu was the killer.

“I think that someone who suffered from his reporting has taken revenge”, said Hung - a correspondent of the Hanoi-based Lao Dong (Labor) newspaper in Long An Province.

“I can tell you his family was an unhappy one but not to that level,” he said.

Dau and Hung had worked together closely on special projects and investigations.

Dau describes Hung as a diligent and professional reporter who was not afraid of danger.

For the past nine years, Hung had worked at the Nguoi Lao Dong and covered news in Long An, Tien Giang and Ben Tre provinces in the Mekong Delta under the pen name Tran Hai Nguyen.

“Hung and I exposed rampant smuggling near Long An’s border with Cambodia and he was given an anonymous deaths threat,” he said. “It’s really dangerous being a reporter here.”

The morning before his attack, Hung confronted a local court judge whom sources had accused of accepting bribes.

Dau said that Hung had received claims that the judge had received bribes from a rich man in Long An’s Ben Luc District in exchange for a favorable ruling in his pending divorce.

Hung and the judge quarreled before he left the office, Dau says.

Undaunted journalist fighting corruption

In 2009, he reported that hundreds of farmers had filled out petitions accusing Tan Tru District authorities of offering meager compensation for land that they would appropriate for an industrial park.

Soon afterward, Hung wrote about the Thu Thua District’s plan to build a cemetery on the province’s most fertile rice paddies.

The provincial administration eventually rejected the district proposal.

In August 2010, Hung reported findings that 111 officials in Long An Province had used forged high school diplomas to win promotions.

On the day he died, Nguoi Lao Dong published Hung’s last story which detailed an unresolved murder that had taken place in Duc Hoa District, last September.

Hung named two men as having murdered a man who had been asked to resolve a family argument. Hung wondered, in his story, why the two suspects had not been placed in police custody during the course of the police investigation - as is customary in Vietnam.

“Hung has always been a good journalist,” said Truong Van Tem, 49, a member of the Long An People’s Council, the local legislature. “He has worked to protect the rights of residents who had suffered from wrongs at the hands of government officials.”

Tem once enjoyed a prominent position as chairman of the Vam Co Waterway Transport Cooperative.

In 1995, he was arrested and charged with official corruption. After just one month in police custody, Tem was released, but the charges stuck.

Two years later, Hung found Tem living in a palm and bamboo hut near a river. He helped champion the man’s innocence.

In 2007, provincial prosecutors officially exonerated Tem of wrongdoing and extended him an official apology and financial compensation for his ordeal.

“His career has hurt many,” Tem said. “It’s no surprise that someone would want to take a revenge on him.”

However, all that is now put to rest as the true murderer has been revealed.

Source: Tuoitre News/VNE