The Cầu Voi Post Office Murders and the Hồ Duy Hải Case

The victims

Nguyễn Thị Ánh Hồng and Nguyễn Thị Thu Vân worked at the Cầu Voi Post Office in Nhị Thành commune, Thủ Thừa District, Long An Province. They were killed at the post office on the night of January 13, 2008 and were discovered the following morning.

Contemporary records consistently identify the case as a double murder accompanied by the theft of property from the post office and the victims.

Arrest and prosecution

Hồ Duy Hải, a local man who knew the two women, was arrested in March 2008. Prosecutors accused him of killing both victims and taking cash, jewelry and telephone cards.

At trial, Hải was convicted of murder and robbery. On December 1, 2008, the Long An provincial court imposed a death sentence. An appellate court upheld the judgment in April 2009.

Why the conviction became controversial

The case later drew sustained scrutiny over the handling of physical evidence and investigative procedure. Vietnamese reporting documented that some objects treated as murder weapons were purchased by investigators after the crime rather than collected from the scene, and that fingerprints recovered at the post office did not match Hải.

Hải and his family maintained that he was wrongfully convicted. The Supreme People's Procuracy eventually sought cassation review and argued that the earlier judgments should be set aside for reinvestigation because of serious procedural and evidentiary problems.

The 2014 stay

Hải was scheduled for execution in December 2014. The execution was halted after intervention from the Office of the President, allowing additional review of the case.

Supreme People's Court review

In May 2020, the Judicial Council of the Supreme People's Court rejected the procuracy's request for reinvestigation and left the death sentence in place. The council acknowledged shortcomings in the investigation and proceedings but concluded that they did not alter what it regarded as the substance of the case.

That ruling did not erase the controversy. The procuracy's challenge, the evidentiary disputes and the defense position remain part of the public record. For that reason this archive does not label the matter simply as an uncontested solved case.

Current status

Hồ Duy Hải remains the person judicially convicted of the murders in the record reviewed for this page. The conviction and death sentence were upheld at cassation in 2020, while the defense position and documented procedural objections have continued to be raised publicly.

The case is therefore classified here as Unsolved / Partial in the editorial sense: there is a final standing conviction, but the evidentiary and procedural controversy is material enough that Crime by Region does not present guilt as independently undisputed fact.