Fingerprints Led to Suspect in Bomb Case

Fingerprints on bomb fragments and Thai cell phone records led federal authorities to charge a former Southern California man with masterminding the attempted bombing of the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok, an attack that carries the echoes of a long-over war.

FBI officials last week arrested Van Duc Vo, 41, as he got off an airplane at John Wayne Airport, accusing him of masterminding the attempted bombing in June of the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok, Thailand.

Vo, wearing black trousers and an open-collared white dress shirt, made an initial court appearance late Monday before a federal magistrate in Los Angeles. He did not address the judge. But, through his court-appointed attorney, Michael Mayock, he waived his right to bail and to a preliminary hearing.

Vo is charged with the use of weapons of mass destruction by a U.S. national in a foreign country. If convicted, he could face life in prison under federal law. Assistant U.S. Atty. Andrew Brown said afterward that prosecutors would seek a grand jury indictment against Vo, barring an early plea agreement in the case.

In court papers unsealed Monday, federal authorities said Vo’s last known U.S. address was on a cul-de-sac near Baldwin Park’s Sierra Vista High School. But a woman who lives at the address said Monday that she did not know Vo and that he did not live there. Neighbors said they did not know him.

The papers described Vo as a member of an unspecified Westminster-based anti-Communist group that “wanted to overthrow the Vietnamese regime.” FBI spokeswoman Cheryl Mimura declined to identify the group, or to say whether the FBI was investigating its operations.

Nguyen Huu Chahn, one of the leaders of the Government of Free Vietnam, a self-styled opposition government-in-exile in Garden Grove, identified Vo as one of its representatives in Southeast Asia. Nguyen said, though, that the group did not sanction bombings of embassies.

The group has its roots in the warming of relations between the United States and Vietnam in 1995. According to a self-produced history on the group’s Web site, former South Vietnamese government and military officials formed the Government of Free Vietnam as the long-standing U.S. embargo was lifted. Its goal was “to protect the historical continuity” of the government it said led Vietnam after the peninsula won independence from France in 1945.

The group’s stated purpose is to replace the current Communist regime with a freely elected government, and to institute a free-market economy.

Despite its lofty ambitions, the group barely registers a ripple in international relations. A U.S. State Department official said Monday that he was unfamiliar with the group and that the agency had not bothered to compile even basic research on its members or goals.

It was not immediately clear when Vo joined the group. A native of My Tho, Vietnam, Vo first entered the United States in 1980 when he was 20. He has lived in El Monte, Pomona, Baldwin Park and Washington state, according to an affidavit unsealed Monday.

The affidavit accuses Vo of masterminding an attack on the Vietnamese embassy in the early morning hours of June 19. Two explosive devices were used, according to the court files.

The first was a bag containing 11 pounds of diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate--the same mixture used in the Oklahoma City bombing--that was tossed over the embassy wall about 3 or 4 a.m. A mobile telephone attached to the device was to have been the trigger, the affidavit said.

The second bomb was a box holding more than 6 pounds of explosives wired to a mobile telephone that was placed against an outside wall at the embassy.

Thai police safely detonated both devices before they could be triggered, the records said.

According to court records, Vo and three other suspects met at a gas station near a Bangkok hotel shortly before a taxi dropped off an Asian man who threw the bomb over the embassy wall.

Thai investigators used telephone records from the mobile phones to track down three other suspects, all now in Thai custody. One of those suspects identified Vo as the mastermind of the plot. Thai police also discovered that on the day of the bombing attempt, Vo had boarded a flight from Bangkok to Los Angeles via Tokyo.

And, the affidavit said, fingerprints lifted from bomb fragments matched the fingerprint records of a man with the same name and date of birth that Vo once used.

One explosives expert said the devices involved could be deadly.

“If you threw that in a crowd, a lot of people could die,” said Sgt. Randy Sterett, supervisor of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department bomb squad. “It definitely could kill people in close proximity.”

Vo is scheduled to appear in federal court Nov. 13, when he will be formally arraigned.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Brown said Vo also faces criminal charges in Thailand, with which the United States has an extradition treaty.

*

Times staff writer David Rosenzweig contributed to this report.