Vietnam, US Cooperate on Arrest in Child Sex Case
Vietnam and the U.S. have announced that cooperation on cross-border crime has led to a U.S. grand jury indictment of an American teacher accused of traveling to the Southeast Asian nation to have sex with minors.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of California alleged that the teacher, Paul Marshall Bodner, of San Francisco, California, “met Vietnamese boys as young as 11 or 12 years old and engaged in sex acts with them at a hotel located in Ho Chi Minh City when he traveled to Vietnam” in the period from July 2015 to August 2016. If convicted he faces up to 30 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Daniel J. Kritenbrink, said the investigation was aided by close cooperation between the two nations, which normalized relations in 1995, 20 years after the Vietnam War, and have since become partners on security, trade, and cultural issues.
VOA News
