Sun Jun 10, 3:54 AM ET
Vietnam has freed a key political dissident less than two weeks before the first US visit by a post-war Vietnamese head of state, a prison official and state media said Sunday.
Nguyen Vu Binh, a 39-year-old journalist and so-called "cyber dissident," was released Saturday afternoon and allowed to return to his Hanoi home, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) said.
It said President Nguyen Minh Triet had on Friday "granted amnesty to a man who was serving a jail term for spying."
It named him as Binh, who was arrested in September 2002, jailed for seven years and given three years' house arrest.
An official on duty at Nam Ha prison, about 50 kilometres (35 miles) south of the capital Hanoi, who declined to give his name, confirmed to AFP that Binh was released on Saturday.
Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Gia Khiem had indicated during a visit to the US in March that the communist government could free Binh, whom supporters and human rights groups said had been in poor health.
Since then, several dissident trials in Vietnam leading to lengthy jail terms have raised tensions with Washington ahead of Triet's meeting with US President George W. Bush, scheduled for June 22.
During Triet's visit, the former enemy nations are expected to sign a framework agreement toward a free trade pact between the superpower and Vietnam, East Asia's fastest growing economy after China.
Binh, a former journalist with the official Tap Chi Cong San (Communist Journal), was accused of links with prominent Vietnamese dissidents such as Pham Hong Son, now under house arrest in Hanoi.
He had also planned to create an alternative political party, taken part in an anti-corruption group and criticised a 1999 Vietnam-China border treaty in an online essay, saying Vietnam had ceded land to the northern neighbour.
Relatives said recently Binh's health had deteriorated due to liver disease and other ailments to the extent where he could not lift his five-year-old daughter, according to the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
The VNA report Sunday said that Binh had written a letter asking for clemency and expressed "his wish to be reunited with his family and (that he) pledged to fully exercise his rights and obligations as a citizen."
The state media report also said Binh had "thanked the Nam Ha prison management for their care while he was serving his sentence there."
Vietnam, which has drawn US and EU protests for jailing several key activists for "disseminating propaganda against the state" this year, says it does not punish people for their political views, only for breaking the law.
Human rights questions have soured otherwise blossoming relations between the United States and Vietnam, which re-established diplomatic ties in 1995, two decades after the fall of Saigon, and have since become major trading partners.
Triet, who arrives in New York on June 18 with a major business delegation, is expected to oversee with Bush the signing of a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement, according to Vietnamese state media.
The landmark US visit had been in some doubt after Bush recently met with a group of four exiled Vietnamese pro-democracy activists.
Last week a White House statement said Bush and Triet would discuss trade and economic ties, cooperation on health, development, cultural and educational ties, and resolving remaining issues stemming from the war.
But it added that Bush would also "express his deep concern over the recent increase of arrests and detentions of peaceful democracy activists in Vietnam and note that such actions will inevitably limit the growth of bilateral ties."
One foreign diplomat in Vietnam, speaking on condition of anonymity on Sunday, called Binh's release "a concession to the United States before the visit of Triet, which had been in real jeopardy."
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