HANOI (Reuters) – Vietnam has protested against China’s alleged detention of Vietnamese fishermen and fishing vessels in the contested Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, a foreign ministry spokesperson said on Thursday.
Vietnam urged China to “immediately release the fishermen and fishing vessels that were illegally detained”, the spokesperson told reporters in a regular press conference, without specifying how many people had been detained or when they had been detained.
There was no immediate response from the Chinese foreign ministry to Reuters’ questions about the incident.
(Reporting by Phuong Nguyen and Franceso Guarascio; Additional reporting by Liz Lee in Beijing; Editing by John Mair and Christina Fincher)
