About the case of burning the body of a murdered husband in Nghia Dan

(Baonghean) -Since the authorities conducted an exhumation and autopsy on the body believed to be that of Nguyen The Hung (Cao Thi Lieu's husband), in Hamlet 1A, Nghia Mai Commune (Nghia Dan District, Nghe An), who had been missing for 16 days, public opinion has not yet calmed down. We would like to provide more information about this incident.

On March 27, Cao Thi Lieu (born in 1979) informed both her paternal and maternal families that her husband was missing after going to the hospital to have his arm examined (before that, Mr. Hung had broken his arm and had to wear a cast). The family then searched everywhere but could not find him. On April 11, Lieu confided that her husband had died and that she had buried him with Mr. Nguyen The Hieu (her husband's brother). After hearing the news, feeling that something was wrong with his sister-in-law's story, Mr. Hieu went to the police to report it.

Realizing that the incident had signs of abnormality, the local authorities and the Criminal Police Department of Nghia Dan district verified, investigated, and exhumed the body for an autopsy. They discovered that the cause of Hung's death was not, as Cao Thi Lieu's initial statement said, due to Hung dying of a stroke after drinking alcohol, but due to suffocation because his body was burned and convulsed, his larynx had many black marks, and there was no external impact.

Faced with undeniable evidence, at the Nghia Dan District Police Department, Cao Thi Lieu had to confess. According to Lieu's testimony: at around 8:00 p.m. on March 27, 2011, Nguyen The Hung (born in 1979) came home drunk and cursed his wife and children. Hung then went to the well, about 20 minutes later Lieu went to the well and saw her husband lying on the grass next to the well. At this time, the thought of killing her husband appeared in Cao Thi Lieu's mind, because her husband often got drunk and cursed his wife and children. Thinking and doing, Lieu took her husband to the cement floor in the pigsty, 5 meters from the well, then took a piece of rope about 3 meters long, tied one end to the rafters of the pigsty and put the other end around her husband's neck and raised her husband's head about 40cm above the ground. Next, Cao Thi Lieu bought about 2.5 liters of gasoline and used old clothes to cover her husband, poured gasoline on him and burned him, then went into the house to sleep. But because the body did not burn completely, and shrunk, at around 4am on March 28, Lieu used an old blanket to wrap her husband's body in it and buried it in a ready-made hole next to the lake 100m from the house.

On the morning of April 14, Cao Thi Lieu was transferred to the Provincial Police Detention Center to continue the investigation and complete the case file, awaiting trial. Public opinion was both outraged and sympathetic for the young woman who pushed herself into a dead end, destroying her family, and her two young children had to endure the death of their father and their mother in prison.

Quang An