6 Vietnamese jailed for beating countryman to death in Japan

Do Manh Hung, 31, Le Dinh Tuan, 36, Nguyen Huy Binh, 33, and Nguyen Luong Sang, 29, received jail terms of six years each for "intentionally inflicting injuries," the court announced Monday.

Le Manh Thang, 28, got seven years for the same charge.

The court heard that a Vietnamese man identified as D challenged another Vietnamese man named Minh to meet him on the afternoon of March 10, 2018, where he then beat him up.

That same night, Minh attended a party gathering around 20 Vietnamese in Japan at his friend Hung’s apartment.

At the party, Minh received several calls from D, who insulted him.

In anger, Minh and his friends arranged to meet D at Mikawa Chiryu train station in the Chiryu City of Aichi Prefecture.

Nine men at the party went to the station, bringing along a metal stick and iron hammer they found at a construction site on the way.

Around 11 p.m. D. got off the train and immediately attacked Hung with a sword, and used pepper spray on the rest of the group.

The nine men then retaliated and beat D unconscious, leaving him on the station floor. Two of them took a photo of him before leaving.

Later that night, local Japanese found D and rushed him for emergency aid, but he died at the hospital.

Japanese police caught three of the nine men and in 2019, a court in Nagoya City of Aichi Prefecture sentenced each of them to 3.5 years in jail for preparing weapons, gathering, and causing injuries that led to death.

The six other men that escaped to Vietnam were arrested later.

All men in the case were migrant workers in Japan.

Vietnamese nationals account for 25% of the 1.82 million foreign workers who were working in Japan as of the end of October last year, according to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.