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Vietnam's kidnapping of businessman reminiscent of Cold War movies - Germany
Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Friday Germany was considering measures against Vietnam over the kidnapping of a former oil executive and described the abduction denied by Hanoi as reminiscent of Cold War spy movies.
WOLFSBURG, Germany: Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Friday Germany was considering measures against Vietnam over the kidnapping of a former oil executive and described the abduction denied by Hanoi as reminiscent of Cold War spy movies.
Gabriel added Germany had asked a Vietnamese intelligence officer at the embassy in Berlin to leave the country since it believes he was involved in the kidnapping of Trinh Xuan Thanh, who Vietnam says had voluntarily returned home.
"We didn't beg him to leave but rather we demanded that he leave because we strongly believe he is a person who was involved in kidnapping," Gabriel told a news conference after talks in Wolfsburg with Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak.
"There is nothing to contradict this assumption, but rather everything supports this assumption that he, with the help of the Vietnamese secret service and using his residence in the Vietnamese embassy in Germany, abducted a person who had asked for asylum," Gabriel added.
A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman declined to say if the unnamed officer, who had been given 48 hours to leave Germany, had already returned to Vietnam. Gabriel did not elaborate on the kind of punitive measures Germany was considering.
Germany is Vietnam's biggest trading partner in the European Union, whose countries are due to consider approving a free trade agreement with the Southeast Asian country, one of the region's fastest growing markets.
Vietnamese officials had requested Thanh's extradition on the margins of the G20 summit, when Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc met German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Gabriel said Thanh "was taken out of Germany using methods which we believe one sees in thriller films about the Cold War. And this is something that we cannot accept."
Germany earlier this week demanded that Thanh be allowed to return. In Vietnam he is accused of causing around $150 million in losses at a Vietnamese state firm.
Vietnamese state television on Thursday broadcast images of Thanh looking tired and he was quoted as saying that he had turned himself in.
His lawyer in Germany ruled out this version of events, adding that witnesses had described how armed men violently bundled a man and a woman into a car with Czech registration plates outside the Sheraton hotel in western Berlin.
