Travel to Homeland Cited : Death Threats Made Against Viet Refugees

Westminster newspaper publisher Tu A Nguyen and two other Vietnamese refugees who recently returned from Vietnam were targets of death threats in a poster circulated in Orange County’s Little Saigon, Westminster police said Tuesday.

“We are taking these threats seriously,” Westminster Police Detective Marcus Frank said.

Last week, posters saying in Vietnamese that the two men and one woman have been “sentenced to death” were found tacked to telephone poles along Bolsa Avenue in Little Saigon, Frank said.

He said the reason given for the death threats is travel to Vietnam by Nguyen, Duy Quac Nguyen--who police believe is an ex-naval officer from South Vietnam--and Rosa Thruong, a Vietnamese singer whose stage name is Tuy Hong and who lives in Los Angeles but has a commercial office in Little Saigon.

Although many Southeast Asians have returned to Vietnam as tourists or to visit relatives, such activity is viewed by outspoken right-wing anti-Communists as aiding the Hanoi government.

Frank, an expert on crime in the Southeast Asian community, said it is a widely held perception among Vietnamese exiles that it is unsafe to advocate touring Vietnam because it is viewed as assisting the Communist government.

In earlier interviews, Nguyen, editor and publisher for the Viet Press, a weekly newspaper based in Westminster, confirmed that he received threats before he traveled to Vietnam as a tourist last March.

Nguyen, whose columns have generated hate mail and telephone threats in the past, has said he has been aware of the consequences for speaking out about one’s political beliefs.

The poster, dated July 22, said the “method of execution” would be decided at a meeting that was to be held Aug. 1, Frank said.

The poster “didn’t say how they were going to execute the sentence,” Frank said.

It is uncertain whether the Vietnamese Extermination Redevelopment Party--the group behind the recent threats--is the same or linked to the clandestine group involved in last year’s slaying of a Vietnamese magazine editor in Garden Grove, Frank said.

The Vietnamese Party to Exterminate the Communists and Restore the Nation, which has been linked to almost a dozen violent acts in the country, is under investigation by the FBI and Garden Grove police for last year’s death of Tap Van Pham.

Pham, editor of Mai magazine, a Vietnamese entertainment publication, died after his Garden Grove office was set afire last August. Pham was asleep in a bed in the rear of the office at the time.

Police have arrested no suspects in Pham’s death.