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Police hunting for 230 escaped drug addicts in Vietnam
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Customs officers use dogs to find drugs smuggled in luggage in Vietnam. (VNA/VNS/Hoàng Hùng)
A Vietnamese official says 230 drug addicts are still at large after a mass escape from a rehabilitation center in southern Vietnam.
Ho Van Loc, deputy director of labor department in Dong Nai province, said the breakout Sunday was started by two inmates and eventually 562 inmates escaped.
Police have so far recaptured 332 of them and are searching for the others, he said.
The center holds 1,481 inmates.
Officials have said that rehabilitation programs in Vietnam — which combine education, communist ideology and physical labor for one to two years — have a high failure rate, with more than 90 percent of the addicts relapsing within five years.
There are an estimated 200,000 drug addicts in Vietnam, many of them heroin users.
