Vietnamese dissident released

"He is in a car, on the way home. I could talk to him on the phone," his wife Vu Thuy Ha told AFP by telephone.

Ha said she went to his jail in Thanh Hoa province Wednesday morning, two hundred kilometers south of Hanoi, but then learned her husband had been taken home by police on a different road.

"He is very happy to be released but he heard today about the death of his father (few days ago). He asked whether he could visit his mother immediately, but police refused," she said.

Son, a 37-year-old businessman and trained doctor, was released several months before the end of a five-year sentence for espionage.

Authorities told journalists he would start a three-year sentence of house arrest.

Son was arrested in Hanoi on March 27, 2002, a few weeks after translating and publishing online an article entitled "What is democracy?" from the US State Department website.