HANOI — A former soldier turned democracy campaigner has been arrested in Vietnam for attempted subversion, sources said on Monday, the same charge that previously saw him jailed for more than five years.



Tran Anh Kim, 66, was taken into police custody on Sept. 21, a source close to the family said, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisals by authorities.



“I was informed several days later that Kim would be jailed for four months for investigation under Article 79 of the criminal code,” the source said. Article 79 is one of several vaguely-worded clauses in the criminal code which rights groups say are used by the communist country’s authoritarian rulers to persecute dissenters.



If found guilty of “activities to overthrow the People’s administration,” defendants can face the death sentence.



Police took Kim and his laptop, mobile phone and some papers containing “pro-democracy statements and writings,” the source said.



Le Cong Dinh, a human rights blogger who was jailed alongside Kim in 2009 and remains under house arrest, said he had also been informed of the dissident’s detention.



“They arrested him due to his participation in the Democratic Party,” he said.



Kim, who served in the army for more than 30 years, was jailed in December 2009 for his role in two “reactionary and illegal” political organizations — the Democratic Party of Vietnam and the pro-democracy bloc known as “8406.”



The banned Democratic Party was dissolved in the 1980s but revived in 2006 by the late Hoang Minh Chinh, a former communist official turned dissident. Bloc “8406,” which takes its name from the date of its creation on April 8, 2006, calls for a multiparty system in Vietnam.



Kim was freed in January this year at the end of his five-and-a-half-year term and was serving an additional three years under house arrest.



Vietnam’s one-party state is regularly denounced by rights groups and Western governments for its hardline stance on press freedom and human rights.



But Hanoi is seeking closer ties with Washington in the face of regional maritime disputes with Beijing, and has released a series of high-profile dissidents into exile in the United States. — AFP