The Hàn Đức Long Wrongful Conviction

The child's disappearance and death

In 2005, a five-year-old girl disappeared from Yên Lý Village in Phúc Sơn Commune, Tân Yên District, Bắc Giang Province. Her body was found the following morning near agricultural land. Investigators concluded that she had been sexually assaulted and killed.

Contemporary retrospective reports disagree on the exact disappearance date: detailed VnExpress accounts give June 26, 2005, while some later reports state May 16. Because the published record is inconsistent, this page does not present either date as undisputed fact.

Hàn Đức Long becomes a suspect

After the initial investigation failed to identify a perpetrator, Hàn Đức Long, a local man, came under investigation months later. Authorities said he confessed during questioning. Long later repudiated the confession and repeatedly maintained that he had been forced to admit crimes he did not commit.

Between 2007 and 2011, courts convicted Long through multiple first-instance and appellate proceedings. He was sentenced to death four times for the child-murder case. He continued to claim innocence throughout the litigation.

The judgments are quashed

In November 2014, the Judicial Council of Vietnam's Supreme People's Court quashed the later first-instance and appellate judgments and ordered the case reinvestigated. The extraordinary review identified unresolved contradictions and evidentiary problems that required further examination.

A renewed police investigation initially continued to recommend prosecution. Prosecutors later reached a different conclusion after reviewing the reinvestigation.

Release after more than eleven years

On December 20, 2016, the Bắc Giang People's Procuracy discontinued the prosecution against Hàn Đức Long and ordered his release. The procuracy said the reinvestigation did not provide sufficient grounds to pursue criminal responsibility against him for the charged offenses.

Long left custody after more than eleven years. The legal record no longer supported treating him as the killer, and his civil rights were to be restored.

Public apology and unresolved responsibility

On April 25, 2017, the High People's Court in Hanoi publicly apologized to Long for the wrongful convictions. Reporting surrounding the apology continued to describe the identity of the child's killer as unresolved.

This case therefore has two separate statuses that must not be collapsed into one. Long's convictions were undone and the case against him was discontinued; at the same time, the underlying homicide was not thereby solved. The reliable sources reviewed for this page do not establish a different convicted perpetrator.

Crime by Region classifies the file as Wrongful Conviction / Homicide Unresolved and keeps it within the Unsolved / Partial archive. This is distinct from the Nguyễn Thanh Chấn wrongful-conviction case elsewhere in the Vietnam archive, in which another man was ultimately convicted of the murder.