Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), the state police, officially charged Duong Van Thai, a Vietnamese blogger who lived in exile in Thailand, with “distributing anti-State propaganda,” a purported violation of Article 117 in the Penal Code. According to an announcement letter dated July 5 that was sent to Duong Thi Lu, the mother of Thai, the police also extended the detention of the Vietnamese blogger until August 12. The letter said he was detained at MPS Detention Center B14 in Thanh Tri District, Hanoi City.

Lu said the police letter was delivered to her home on July 14, three months after state-sponsored agents allegedly kidnaped Thai.

Duong Van Thai, 41, owned a Youtube channel called “Thái Văn Đường” and specialized in reporting on infighting within the Vietnamese Communist Party. All videos and live streams published on the channel disappeared shortly after he went missing. Thai had been a political refugee in Thailand since early 2019 and was granted refugee status by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Bangkok in the same year.

On April 13, he was reported missing after leaving his home in Pathum Thani Province, Thailand. Three days later, on April 16, the Ha Tinh Provincial Police in Vietnam said they found a man named Duong Van Thai who “illegally crossed the border to enter Vietnam from Laos.” Vietnamese activists and those close to Thai believed he had been kidnapped by Vietnamese security agents in Bangkok and forcibly transported back to Vietnam.

The alleged abduction of Duong Van Thai worried Vietnamese dissidents and human rights activists living in Thailand, who feared that Vietnam’s security apparatus has become increasingly bold in its repression of foreign-based critics.

In a Facebook posting on July 20, attorney Dang Dinh Manh, a human rights lawyer in the United States, said that the Vietnamese police inadvertently admitted their operations to kidnap Duong Van Thai in their announcement of indicting him.

Manh wrote that according to Vietnam’s criminal procedure law, the limit for the first temporary detention is four months. This coincides with the unconfirmed information that Thai was kidnapped on April 13 in Thailand, while his temporary custody will conclude on August 12. The attorney believes that the Vietnamese police planned the abduction of the blogger in Thailand’s territory in advance.

Moreover, Manh added that the police security investigation agency officially charged Duong Van Thai with violating Article 117 of the Penal Code instead of punishing him for an illegal border crossing, which the Ha Tinh Police initially alleged.