• A Vietnamese man has been extradited to Germany.
• The suspect was detained in Prague on behalf of German arrest warrants.
• Kidnapping at the time as “a blatant violation of the sovereignty of Germany.

A Vietnamese man was extradited to Germany to face charges of taking part in a brazen Cold War-style kidnapping of an oil executive ordered by Hanoi, Prosecutors said Thursday

The suspect, identified only as Anh T.L., was detained in Prague last month on the basis of German and European arrest warrants and was transferred to Germany.

Trinh Xuan Thanh, a fugitive Vietnamese state company official, was kidnapped and spirited back to Hanoi in July 2017.

“The kidnapping was carried about by members of the Vietnamese secret service and employees of the Vietnamese embassy in Berlin as well as several Vietnamese nationals living in Europe, among them Ahn T.L.,” the Public Prosecutor General at the Federal Court of Justice said in a statement.

It said that the suspect “was involved in carrying out the operation, spying on the victim and acting as a driver of vehicles used in the operation”.

The 52-year-old Thanh and his female companion Thi Minh P.D. were walking in Berlin’s Tiergarten park when they were dragged into a van in broad daylight and smuggled back to Vietnam.

Thanh — a senior Communist party functionary who was seeking political asylum in Germany — has since been sentenced to two life terms in Vietnam on corruption charges.

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A Berlin court in July 2018 convicted a Czech-Vietnamese national, identified as Long N.H., of aiding the abduction and working for a foreign intelligence service.

They handed him a relatively mild sentence of three years and 10 months after he confessed to his involvement.

The presiding judge described the kidnapping at the time as “a blatant violation of the sovereignty of Germany, unprecedented in recent history”.

The German government was outraged, describing the incident as a “scandalous violation” of its sovereignty. It expelled two Vietnamese diplomats and summoned the ambassador on multiple occasions.

Communist-ruled Vietnam has always maintained that Thanh, the former head of PetroVietnam Construction, voluntarily returned to face embezzlement charges.

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