Vietnam slams embassy incident

Vietnam slams embassy incident

HANOI (Reuters): Vietnam asked France on Thursday to punish a 70-year-old Vietnamese who fired a flare gun at its embassy in Paris last week and said it should tighten security to prevent a repeat of such "very serious terrorist sabotage".

Sources in Paris said that in the incident last Friday, the political refugee who fled Vietnam as a "boat person" in 1975, set fire to a Vietnamese flag he had hooked on the embassy gates and fired five distress flares into the air. No one was injured and the man surrendered to police without incident.

In a statement, Vietnam's foreign ministry called the act "very serious terrorist sabotage" and added it was the second time the man had carried out such an attack.

It was the third attack on a Vietnamese embassy in about a month and came just ahead of Vietnam's 55th national day on Saturday. The French Embassy in Hanoi has said it "deeply regretted the incident" but had no further comment on Thursday.