Vietnam mum given life in jail for killing son, 5, to claim over $200k in insurance payout

A 45-year-old woman has been sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Vietnam after she was found guilty of murdering her five-year-old son to fraudulently claim more than 4.1 billion dong ($200,500) in life insurance payouts.

Thi Ty Na staged her son's death as an accidental drowning, according VietNamNet (VNN) on Thursday (Aug 6).

She was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and six years for insurance business fraud by the Da Nang People's Court, with the sentences combined into a life term under Vietnamese law.

According to prosecutors, she claimed her son, identified only as NVH, had accidentally drowned in a bathroom bucket at their home on Jan 2, 2023, reported The Straits Times.

The boy's paternal aunt alerted police after discovering that Na had deliberately turned a security camera away before the incident, Viet Nam News reported.

The aunt also told investigators that another of Na's children had died in similar circumstances in 2021, after which Na received more than 2 billion dong in insurance compensation, prompting the authorities to launch a full investigation.

Local police concluded that only Na and her son were in the house at the time of his death, while forensic evidence and the size of the bucket contradicted her claim that the five-year-old had drowned accidentally.

A post-mortem examination found bruises on the boy's forehead, groin and leg, and prosecutors said Na had forced his head into the bucket before staging the scene to resemble an accident and pretending to be asleep until his older sister discovered the body.

Court documents showed Na had previously served a 40-month prison sentence for theft and later fell into financial difficulty after her husband died in 2020, according to Viet Nam News.

Prosecutors said that after running out of money, Na devised a plan to profit from life insurance policies she had taken out on her children.

She subsequently bought seven life insurance policies covering her four children, named herself as the beneficiary and paid annual premiums exceeding 100 million dong. 

Her youngest son was covered under two separate life insurance policies, reported VNN.

Prosecutors said she spent the payouts after her son's death on personal expenses.

She denied the charges throughout the trial, but the court ruled that prosecutors had proved beyond reasonable doubt that she murdered her son to obtain insurance money and sentenced her to life imprisonment.

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helmy.saat@asiaone.com