Vietnam denies Chinese agents abducted two Taiwan spies

Jul 26, 2006, 11:54 GMT

Taipei/Hanoi - Chinese agents kidnapped two Taiwanese military spies in Vietnam in May, took them to China and they have since been under house arrest, a Taiwan newspaper alleged Wednesday.

Chu Kung-hsun and Hsu Chang-kuo, colonels in Taiwan's Military Intelligence Bureau (MIB), flew to Vietnam to gather information on China on May 25 and were scheduled to return to Taipei on May 29, but vanished after meeting an informant on May 26, the China Times daily said.

However, the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry has issued a statement saying it categorically denies having any knowledge of any such incident inside the territory of Vietnam.

According to the report in the China Times, the MIB sent an official to Vietnam to probe the pair's disappearance and found out that they had been abducted by Chinese agents based in Nanning, capital of China's Guangxi province.

The newspaper said Chinese agents had been questioning them every day but have not formally arrested them.

The incident has dealt a heavy blow to Taiwan's intelligence work, because Chu was in charge of MIB's spying in China, the paper said.

In 2002, Chinese spies kidnapped three US-based Chinese pro-democracy activists at the Vietnamese border and forcibly took them to China. China acknowledged their arrest only a year later and sentenced one of them, Wang Bingzhang, to life imprisonment.

The Taiwan government has not commented on the latest incident.

Before Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, the MIB directed its intelligence-gathering in China from Hong Kong.

After 1997, MIB moved its operations to South-East Asian nations and Chu was in charge of a dozen intelligence stations in the region.

Taiwan and China have been technically at war since 1949, when the Kuomintang nationalists lost the Chinese civil war and set up their government-in-exile in Taipei.