Vietnam jails 7 for placing war dead in fake graves and scamming families of MIA soldiers

A court in central Vietnam sentenced seven people to up to life in prison for defrauding families of Vietnam War soldiers by moving unidentified war dead into fake graves and claiming to have found their kin.

Nguyen Van Thuy, 56, was convicted of fraud and infringement on graves and given life in prison in the one-day trial, Presiding Judge Vo Ngoc Mau said.

Thuy’s wife and four relatives received 5 to 25 years on the same charges, the judge said. The remaining defendant was given a one-year suspended sentence for infringement on graves.

“Their crime is very serious,” Mau said from Quang Tri province. “It hurt the families of the soldiers killed in action and hurt the nation as a whole.”

More than 1 million Vietnamese soldiers were killed in the war, which ended in 1975. At least 200,000 bodies have yet to be found, while the remains of some 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers have been buried in unnamed graves.

The judge said the seven defendants stole more than 70 sets of remains of soldiers in unnamed graves from several war cemeteries and set up fake graves buried with fake personal effects such as water containers and helmets and bore the names of the dead soldiers the families were seeking.