HCMC military school requests police investigation into fabrication of student rape

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

“It is likely to be a dirty PR scheme, done by certain reactionary organizations which want to distort information, instigate 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 fanpages, which tend to be anonymous. The owners of these fanpages use them to post fake news, without management or verification, causing them to spread fast and trigger unrest,” he added.

Social media was ablaze Wednesday night with news that a female student from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Foreign Languages and Information Technology (HUFLIT) was raped while undergoing military classes 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, to which various rumors became attached. The most resilient rumor was that the screams were the sound of a woman being raped in the barracks, which at that time were occupied by students from the university on a school-mandated retreat for the fundamentals of military training, which is common practice at Vietnamese colleges.

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

Other students then accused a particular female member of their cohort of stealing. The accused student then rushed outside without saying anything. 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.