A court in northern Vietnam has sentenced five Chinese men to death for trafficking nearly eight tonnes of hashish destined for Canada, the Vietnam News Agency (VNA) said Saturday. According to VNA, the drugs came from Pakistan and were to be shipped to North America through Vietnam's northern port of Mong Cai.
The defendants, aged between 42 and 57, were arrested in May 2008 and were also charged with smuggling nearly 180,000 dollars in cash. Vietnam has some of the toughest drug trafficking laws in the world. The latest sentences brought to at least 58 the number of people to have been condemned to death in Vietnam this year, 14 of them in drug trafficking cases, according to an AFP count based on local media and court sources.