³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

A man has been jailed in Vietnam 14 years after killing another man in Wales.

Tran Nguyen died at Newport's Royal Gwent Hospital in 2006 after being brought in beaten and unconscious.

Tu Minh Le, 47, who had fled to Vietnam, was sentenced to 12 years for unlawful killing at the People's Court of Hung Yen Province on Tuesday.

Three men were at Cardiff Crown Court in 2008.

Gwent Police said following the 2008 convictions it continued working with the National Crime Agency (NCA) and Vietnamese authorities to track down Tu Minh Le.

Mr Nguyen was killed two months after arriving in the UK in the back of a lorry.

During the 2008 court case, the prosecution said Mr Nguyen had been at a cannabis plantation at a property in Newport when it was raided by rivals, who tied him up and stole the crop of drug.

The court heard his gangmaster suspected he may have had a role in the theft and was taken to a house in London where he was beaten up.

Mr Nguyen, a father-of-two, was then driven back to Newport where he was then dumped unresponsive and unconscious at the hospital.

Police did not discover Mr Nguyen's identity until a month after his death when his brother-in-law went to the Royal Gwent Hospital looking for him.

Det Ch Insp Justin O'Keefe, who has worked on the case since the start, said it had been one of the most logistically challenging inquiries ever faced by the force.

"This was the first time a trial was held in Vietnam for a foreign offence," he said.

"It's taken years of work liaising with a range of authorities, but we never lost hope that we would see the outcome we now have."

NCA head of region for Asia Pacific, Mark Bishop, said: "This was a truly landmark case which came about because of unprecedented co-operation between the NCA, Gwent Police and the Vietnamese ministry of public security...

"Tran Nguyen's family have been through a horrendous ordeal and have had to wait 14 years for this verdict. I hope it brings some form of comfort or closure to them."