CANBERRA - U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Sunday that Vietnam had released from prison the wife of an American citizen after he visited the country to attend an Asian regional forum this week.
A senior State Department official said Oanh Ress, a Vietnamese woman, had been arrested several months ago on arrival at the airport after officials found pamphlets on her that they found "objectionable."
"When I was in Vietnam the other day they said that they thought they would be able to process her out shortly and we just got confirmation in the last 24 hours -- she's been released," Powell told reporters aboard his plane en route from Beijing to Australia at the end of an Asian tour.
"She did something that was considered inimical to state security," he added.
Powell's Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour Lorne Craner, who travelled with Powell to China after attending an Asian regional forum with him in Vietnam this week, will return there next week to open a more detailed dialogue on human rights.
Powell's visit to Vietnam was highly symbolic of the two countries' relationship three decades after a war in which he fought, and in which the United States failed to stop communist rule taking hold in the country.
Though Washington's main foreign policy focus in Vietnam is tracing the remains of soldiers still missing in action, it is also focused on a bilateral trade pact it hopes will give it more power to persuade Vietnam to improve its human rights record.
Craner will try to encourage Vietnam to release religious figures detained in the country, a senior State Department official said.
12:19 07-29-01
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