BRATISLAVA, Feb 12 — The Slovak foreign ministry today said it has expelled a Vietnamese diplomat over the 2017 kidnapping of a Vietnamese oil executive in Berlin who was secretly spirited back to Hanoi via Slovakia. 

The ministry informed the Vietnamese ambassador on February 5 that one of his diplomats was persona non grata and had 48 hours to leave the EU member. 

"Slovakia decided to take this serious step in connection with the final decision of a German court of appeal on the abduction of a Vietnamese national,” the Slovak foreign ministry said in a statement.

Local media reported that Vietnam had denounced the unnamed diplomat’s expulsion as out of line with the "traditional friendship” between the two countries. 

The foreign ministry had told AFP in 2018 that bilateral relations between Slovakia and Vietnam "will be frozen” unless the Asian country explains the kidnapping of Vietnamese citizen Trinh Xuan Thanh from Germany in July 2017.

On February 2, Germany’s Federal Court of Justice upheld the conviction of Vietnamese citizen Long N.H., a Czech resident involved in Thanh’s kidnapping.

A senior Communist party member facing corruption charges, Thanh had been seeking political asylum in Germany.

After the abduction, Thanh was taken back to Hanoi via Slovakia and was sentenced to two life terms on charges of corruption during his time as the head of state-run PetroVietnam Construction, a subsidiary of the country’s largest oil firm.

In August 2018, the leading Slovak daily Dennik N published testimonies of unnamed Slovak policemen claiming that "a seemingly drunk and bruised individual” joined an official Vietnamese delegation at Bratislava airport in 2017 and was dragged onto a Slovak government plane.

Slovak officials then flatly denied having knowingly participated in the kidnapping. The interior ministry described the Dennik N article as "a fabrication and sci-fi”.

Vietnam’s Communist government has taken aim at bankers, businessmen and politicians it accuses of mismanagement as it vows to stamp out corruption.

The unprecedented anti-graft campaign has seen scores of people jailed in the South-east Asian country. — AFP