Release International has completed a fact-finding visit and finds the Vietnam War is still rumbling on - with Christians now regarded as the enemy, says one of the leading persecution watchdogs, Release International.

Christians in Vietnam are being targeted as 'agents of America'. They describe torture and near starvation as the authorities threaten to kill them slowly.

Prisoners' wives and a former prisoner have been describing the way Christians from Vietnam's tribal highlands are routinely beaten, tortured and starved behind bars - in a land which supposedly guarantees freedom of religion.

'Esther' and 'Deborah' and former prisoner 'Silas' have been telling Release International about the ordeal suffered in jail by Christians calling for true freedom of worship and the return of land seized by the authorities. They tell their story in the latest edition of the webcast World Update on the Persecuted Church, available on www.releaseinternational.org

They travelled hundreds of miles and have taken a great risk to explode the myth of freedom of religion in Vietnam and to call for prayer and support for Christian prisoners.

Esther described how they set about 'Abraham', her husband, with a wooden club spiked with two long nails. Then they turned a snarling Alsatian on him, before lashing his unconscious body to their Jeep and dragging it along the road.

When they finally permitted Esther to see her husband she says: "He could not recognise me. He was like a dumb man. They had beaten him in the face and broken his jaw. He could not talk."

Esther and Abraham are Christians, from one of the mountain tribes of Vietnam.

"My husband requested freedom for the tribal people, and freedom to worship God." Esther explains. "And he asked for this publicly."

'Job', another Christian prisoner, also called for freedom of worship - a freedom guaranteed under Vietnamese law.

Despite those legal guarantees, the authorities closed Job's village church and confiscated their land - measures commonplace in the tribal highlands of Vietnam, where unregistered Christians are regarded with suspicion as enemy agents working to undermine communism.

They accused Job of being involved with separatists, tortured him to extract a confession and threw him behind bars.