HCMC military school requests police investigation into alleged fabrication of rape

Tran Hoai Trung, a political commissar of the school, said Friday that documents and evidence regarding the case have been collected and sent to the authorities for investigation.

"It is likely to be a smear campaign, done by certain reactionary organizations which want to distort information, getting reactions from people and taint the reputation of the army," he said.

The HCMC police department responsible for cybersecurity has cooperated with the military school to ascertain the motives and goals of whoever spread the information.

"Initial investigations revealed that fake news is frequently posted on Confession fan pages, which are Facebook pages where people can share their "confessions" about things anonymously. The owners of these fan pages use them to post false info, without oversight or verification, causing them to spread fast and trigger unrest," he added.

Social media was ablaze Wednesday night with posts saying that a female student from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Foreign Languages and Information Technology (HUFLIT) had been raped while undergoing military training at the Center for National Defense and Security Training at the Zone 7 Military School.

A video circulated online captured the sounds of people screaming in the night, which led to the spread of a variety of rumors. The most resilient rumor was that the screams were the sound of a woman being raped in the barracks, which at that time was occupied by students from the university on a school-mandated retreat for the fundamentals of military training, which is a common practice at Vietnamese colleges.

At a Thursday press conference, Nguyen Tien Son, the political head of Zone 7 Military School, said that on Tuesday night a student had discovered that they had lost VND1.4 million ($60).

Son said other students accused a particular female member of their group of stealing the money. The accused student then rushed outside without saying anything, and once outside, she began screaming and crying because she believed she'd been falsely accused, he said.

The Center for National Defense and Security Training at Zone 7 Military School, located in HCMC’s outlying District 12, is currently organizing military education classes for students at HUFLIT, as assigned by the Ministry of National Defense.