Police in Quang Ninh Province have promised to investigate a case involving six policemen who have been suspended for their alleged involvement in spreading a clip of two nude sex workers on the Internet recently.

A senior police official from the northern province told Thanh Nien last week that they were yet to determine whether one of the policemen had posted the clip on the Internet.

“No matter who they are, even if it is one of the policemen [that posted the clip], they would face an official investigation,” the official said on condition of anonymity. The provincial police department has instructed the police force in Quang Ninh’s Cam Pha Town to facilitate the investigation, he added.

Senior lieutenant colonel Nguyen Quoc Tien, Cam Pha chief police, said the clip was recorded in a prostitution raid by the town police on June 29 at the Quang Dung Hotel in Cam Thuy Ward.

He said that senior lieutenant Tran Van Hoan recorded the clip with his cell phone with the support of lieutenant Hoang Ha Long, both members of the seven-member task force that raided the hotel.

In the clip, Long demands that the sex workers not cover themselves as Hoan illegally films them with his phone camera, local media reported.

Hoan and Long and another member of the taskforce, Ha Trong Huan, were among the six policemen to be suspended. Tien did not say how Huan was involved in the case.

Tien, the Cam Pha Town chief police, said regulations ban filming sex workers in the nude.

One of the sex workers confessed she was 20 years old and from the northern mountainous province of Yen Bai and another said she was 18 years old and came from Lai Chau Province. The two sex workers and their clients were fined and released while the procurer, 33-year-old Dang Thi Huyen, arrested in subsequent investigation, was charged with “procuring prostitution.”

Prostitution is illegal in Vietnam.

The clip was later transferred to Long’s cell phone before being passed to other policemen who were not members of the taskforce, including Dao Duy Long, a policeman in Cam Pha’s Cam Thanh Ward and Nguyen Thanh Tung and Nguyen Manh Hung, both Cam Pha Town policemen. This became known after the clip was spread on the Internet and sparked widespread public outrage.

On November 19, Quang Ninh Province police suspended Tran Van Hoan, Hoang Ha Long, Dao Duy Long, Nguyen Manh Hung, Nguyen Thanh Tung, and Ha Trong Huan pending further investigation.