Tran Hieu made two frantic phone calls to the Canadian embassy in Hanoi the evening before his wife Nguyen Thi Hiep was shot by a firing squad at dawn.

``They are going to execute my wife in the next eight hours,'' an anguished Tran Hieu said he told an embassy worker on April 24. The exclusive interview from his Hanoi home yesterday was translated by his stepson Trung Le.
 
 

Nguyen, a 43-year-old Toronto seamstress, is the only Canadian citizen to be executed on drug charges. She faced the firing squad at the Hanoi's Xuan Phong detention centre on April 25. In Ottawa, Foreign Affairs spokesperson Reynald Doiron said the message relayed from the Canadian embassy in Hanoi appeared to be a rumour of the pending execution of an unknown person.

Even though Nguyen was shackled in a death row cell, written assurances had been made to the Canadian government by the Vietnamese government that her execution would be stayed so Toronto police could present evidence that she and her 74-year-old mother, Tran Thi Cam, might have been innocent dupes, said Doiron.

Tran recalled yesterday how he got a phone call April 24 from a friend who worked at the Hanoi prison. It was 7 p.m. The friend said a woman was to be executed the next day.

An hour later, after confirming his wife's name was on the execution papers, Tran made two frantic calls to the cell phone of Vu Thu, the translator at the Canadian embassy in Hanoi. It was Easter Monday.

``I told the translator it's going to happen,'' Tran said, who added Vu said he would give the message to consular official Jean-Pierre Nadeau.

But when a panicked Tran phoned back 30 minutes later, he was told Nadeau was in Thailand. ``He said he transferred the message to the ambassador's assistant.''

After that, a despondent Tran got on his motorcycle and drove around Hanoi for hours trying to decide his next move. ``I really didn't know what to do,'' he said. Ten hours later, his wife was dead.

Three days later, two Canadian embassy officials and a translator came to Tran's house and said they were sorry, he recalled.

Nguyen Thi Hiep, 42, who was convicted in a Hanoi court in March, 1997, of smuggling 5.4 kilograms of heroin, was shot by a firing squad at dawn Monday 24th April.

When Nguyen was marched in front of the firing squad, she was "gagged and blindfolded . . . continuing to maintain her innocence right up to the end" said a Canadian foreign affairs official.

"She refused to sign a statement of guilt," Reynald Doiron, spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in Ottawa, said yesterday.

Several minutes after the execution, a prison official informed Nguyen's husband,  in Hanoi, of her death, Doiron said.
 

- Trung Le, son of Nguyen Thi Hiep:"The execution took place in absolute secrecy," he said. "The family was not permitted to see her."

In the three years until her execution, Nguyen had been shackled in a squalid rat-infested jail cell while international appeals from Prime Minister Jean Chretien, Axworthy, U.S. President Bill Clinton, Rev. Jesse Jackson, former boxing great Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, Amnesty International, the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted and the woman's family appealed for clemency - but all were ignored.
 
 

While a court in Hanoi sentenced Nguyen to die, her 74-year-old mother Tran Thi Cam was sentenced to life in prison.

Now the family is faced with the task of working out how they'll bring her body home.

"We want to have her body brought back to Canada," Nguyen's oldest son Trung Le said last night. "According to our culture she must be buried near where we live."

Trung Le recently returned from visiting his grandmother in a Vietnam prison.

"Our family doesn't want to let her know her daughter is dead . . . for at least a couple of months," he said.

"She's very sick. We don't want to tell her for at least two more months," Le said.
 
 

Vietnam is barring the news media from covering the return of the remains of
an executed Vietnamese-Canadian woman to her family.

Nguyen Thi Hiep's execution for drug smuggling last month sparked a
diplomatic firestorm because Vietnam had promised Ottawa to delay the
execution based on new evidence that Hiep had been duped. Hiep, 43, was
convicted in 1997 along with her mother, Tran Thi Cam, 74, for smuggling 5.5
kilograms of heroin through Hanoi airport.
 
 
 

• April, 1996: Ms. Nguyen and her mother are arrested for smuggling 5½ kilograms of heroin through a Hanoi airport. Half a world away, another Vietnamese-Canadian seamstress is caught with similar drug-filled artwork at Toronto's Pearson Airport.
• March, 1997: Ms. Nguyen is sentenced to death.
• August, 1997: Ms. Nguyen's appeal fails.
• June, 1999: Having concluded that the woman in the Pearson bust was duped, police successfully carry out a sting operation and arrest Phu Hoa, 44, of Mississauga, who is later sentenced to 14 years. Two associates get lesser sentences. The detectives contact the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted about Ms. Nguyen's case.
• September, 1999: The association and two Toronto Police officers meet the Vietnamese ambassador. Six days later, Ms. Nguyen's husband visits her in jail. Visits by her sons follow.
• December, 1999: Former boxer and convict Rubin (Hurricane) Carter meets U.S. President Bill Clinton in the White House for a screening of the film The Hurricane. The men discuss Ms. Nguyen's case.
• January: Ms. Nguyen is granted a temporary stay of execution. Canadians relax their efforts, hoping a meeting with Toronto Police detectives will exonerate Ms. Nguyen. The meeting never occurs.
• April 24: Ms. Nguyen is executed without warning, tied to a pole. She proclaims her innocence moments before she dies.