General Vang Pao, arrested in the United States on charges of plotting a coup in communist Laos, once commanded a CIA-backed "secret army" of hilltribe fighters and mercenaries during the Vietnam war.
A member of the Hmong ethnic minority, General Pao ran an irregular army in the 60s and 70s, commanding fighters in the US-funded covert war against Vietnamese and Lao communist forces. When the Washington-backed Lao royal government fell in 1975, General Pao was airlifted to Thailand and, along with other Hmong, resettled in the United States.
From exile, the fervent anti-communist remained a leader of the Hmong community and a defender of the minority, many of whose members, according to human rights groups, are still persecuted and killed in isolated Laos.
On Monday, at age 77, Pao was arrested in California along with eight others, charged with plotting to overthrow the Lao government using explosives, AK-47 assault rifles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles.
The nine suspects, according to the criminal complaint, wanted to bomb Lao government buildings and make them "look like the results of the attack upon the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001." Pao was born in 1931 in central Xieng Khouang province. His community, the Hmong, are a mountain people from China who practised slash-and-burn farming, grew opium and were known in Laos by the pejorative Meo, or "savage."
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