Tu, a biologist and dissident writer whose pen name is Ha Si Phu, was arrested in Dalat. Two days later, police searched his house and confiscated documents and manuscripts, including two issues of Thien Chi Monthly, a Vietnamese-language journal published in Germany that had reprinted some of Tu’s essays. Tu was reportedly charged with violating Article 92 of the Criminal Code, a national security provision that outlaws possessing or divulging “state secrets.” Earlier in the year, Tu had written an essay in which he called Marxism-Leninism an outdated relic that was harmful to the country’s economic reforms. In a Dec. 4 radio interview on a California staton he called on Vietnamese-Americans to lobby for withholding the most-favored-nation trading status for Vietnam until that country’s democracy was “well developed.”