Pictures of a foreign tourist crying after being robbed in Ho Chi Minh City went viral and officially endangered Vietnam’s global image as an ideal destination.
On March 11, 2016, Friday, a European woman and her friend were walking and reading a map along Luong Huu Khanh Street in District 1 when two men riding a motorcycle approached them, grabbed her handbag and escaped. The bag contained all of the woman’s important things like her passport and all of her money. According to witnesses, the woman was so scared that she collapsed after the incident. When she came to, she couldn’t stop crying and later reported the crime to the local police.
Pictures of the woman crying were taken and posted on the internet and went viral quickly. This prompted the party secretary of Ho Chi Minh City Dinh La Thang to call an urgent meeting and order the city police and tourism authorities to personally apologize to the two tourists.
Image by http://www.thanhniennews.com/
This was not an isolated case. In fact, a number of robberies against foreign visitors have been reported lately, threatening the tourism sector of Vietnam. In 2015, 130 robbery and snatch-and-run cases involving foreign tourists were investigated by the local city police. This recent incident even came at a time when the country has been consciously making efforts to entice more visitors to come, like its 15-day visa exemption policy from specific European and Asian nations. This particular move boosted visitor arrival into the country to 16% in just the first two months of this year.
With this threat to its tourism, and Ho Chi Minh City itself being one of the major tourist destinations in Vietnam, the police division is taking measures on organizing a special unit with the sole mission of protecting tourists in line with the increasing crime against them and complaints from diplomatic agencies about the safety of their citizens.