Three Internet users freed in Vietnam after nine months: watchdog (AFP)

HANOI (AFP) - Three Vietnamese arrested last October for engaging in an Internet discussion about democracy have been freed after almost nine months in detention, a global media watchdog said.

Reporters Without Borders said Truong Quoc Tuan, his brother Truong Quoc Huy, and Huy's fiancee Lisa Pham, were arrested in Ho Chi Minh City for taking part in a Voice over Internet Protocol chat about democracy on the Pal Talk website.

They were accused of inciting the population to "overthrow the government," according to Reporters Without Borders.

"It has just emerged that they were freed on July 7," the watchdog said.

District police refused to confirm the trio's release, saying they had never heard about them.

"This is the end of a scandalous case in which three young Internet users spent nearly nine months in detention without being tried," the press freedom organisation said.

"We call on the Vietnamese authorities to stop spying on chat forums. We also urge them to release the last two cyber-dissidents still being held in Vietnam, Pham Hong Son and Nguyen Vu Binh."

Son and Binh are serving jail sentences of respectively five and seven years.

Vietnam retains a tight grip over all domestic media. No private media outlets are permitted and the regime is consistently accused by human rights organisations of cracking down on dissent and jailing anyone criticizing the Communist Party and the government.

A study by several of the world's top universities released last week described Vietnam's Internet censorship as blocking political rather than pornographic content.

The communist nation "is focusing its filtering on sites considered threatening to its one-party system," said the report.

The country of 83 million people now has nearly 13 million Internet users, most of whom use cybercafes.

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