HANOI, March 20 (Reuters) - Officials in a village in southern Vietnam said on Tuesday they had found the charred body of a woman but rejected suggestions that a Buddhist activist had burnt herself to death there to demand religious freedom.
"A body of a woman was found on the side of a road on Monday," said an official from the People's Committee in Tan Hoi, a commune in Vinh Long province bordering Dong Thap province.
"No disturbance occurred here yesterday. We don't have Hoa Hao followers living in this area," he said, adding that police were investigating and that it looked like a case of murder.
Nguyen Van Coi, chairman of the Overseas Hoa Hao Buddhist Association, told Reuters on Monday 75-year-old Nguyen Thi Thu, director of the Hoa Hao Buddhist Women's League, doused herself with petrol and set herself alight in Tan Hoi village on Monday.
The People's Committee official quoted people in Tan Hoi as saying the woman's body, which did not appear old, had been dropped by a car. "The woman was definitely not burned in the place where she was found because the grass around her was not burned," he said.
"She was not resident in our area and the provincial police are investigating the case. It looks like a murder case. No one saw the car's number and the body was dropped in a remote place."
Monday was the 54th anniversary of the disappearance of Hoa Hao prophet Huynh Phu So after his abduction by communist forces.
Several hundred supporters of the Hoa Hao gathered peacefully in the sect's heartland in An Giang province bordering Dong Thap on Monday to mark the occassion.
RELEASE OF CHAIRMAN
The Overseas Hoa Hao said Thu had called out demands for religious freedoms before she died.
It said about 100 police officers appeared on the scene and extinguished the flames and took the body away, using batons to beat off Buddhists who tried to stop them.
The statement said one of Thu's demands was the release of 82-year-old Hoa Hao chairman Le Quang Liem, who has reported being detained by police for 30 hours at the weekend before being allowed to return to his home in Ho Chi Minh City under guard.
The Hoa Hao are a neo-Buddhist sect combining Buddhism, animism, Confucianism and indigenous practices.
They claim about four million adherents in Vietnam and have long complained of persecution stemming from their armed opposition to communism during the Vietnam war.
Hanoi recognises a mainstream Hoa Hao church organisation but radicals from the sect are not tolerated and have made suicide attempts and threatened immolations at protests in the past.
Several Buddhist monks burned themselves to death in famous protests in the early 1960s against religious repression by the then government of South Vietnam. Pictures of one such immolation created some of the most enduring images of the Vietnam War.
Religion is currently a highly charged matter for Vietnam's communist government, which hopes for early ratification of a landmark trade pact with the United States, something that could be held up by rights issues.
06:36 03-20-01
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