Two bomb blasts ripped through a pair of neighboring hotels catering to foreign tourists in central Phnom Penh Wednesday, killing three people, including a police officer, and wounding 11 others in what police called a terrorist attack by a group of extortionists. A hotel housekeeper and another Cambodian man were also killed.
The first blast blew out the second floor of the Hong Kong Hotel on Monivong Boulevard around 11 am, wounding five people.
Within an hour and just 50 meters away, a second bomb went off in room 410 of the Favour Hotel, killing three people and injuring six more, including a citizen of Ghana, police and hotel staff said.
Each explosion was preceded by an anonymous phone call to police headquarters and to the hotels from a man claiming to represent a group called “Maria.”
“Do you know Maria? It’s a group of grenade attackers. Do you know Maria?” the caller can be heard to ask on police tapes, whispering and gasping.
The caller demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars from each hotel, and then gave each staff minutes to comply.
After the explosion at the Favour Hotel, a third call came in, promising a third blast. But all was quiet late Wednesday.
The dead men, Kim Veng Leang, 30, a police officer, and Kim Hout, also 30, were relatives of Thav Kimlong, owner of the Favour Hotel and first deputy governor of Kampong Cham province.
After the Maria caller told them they had 20 minutes to deliver $200,000 or a bomb would go off, they went to investigate room 410, which had been occupied by a Cambodian man who checked out a few hours before the blast.
The bomb exploded when they opened the door. Witnesses said the explosion flung Chhun Sakhon, a hotel maid who accompanied the men, out of the building and left her badly mutilated body buried under the rubble below.
Each of the explosions scattered shattered glass and burning rubble for dozens of meters and wounded several people, including two construction workers laying a sewer pipe in front of the Hong Kong Hotel.
Tian Kayo Aubert, a Cameroon national staying at the Favour Hotel, heard the explosion at Hong Kong Hotel and went to look. A little while later, he was taking a nap in Room 406 at the Favour when the second bomb went off.
“It was a big explosion,” Aubert said. “I thought to myself ‘I’m going to die.’”
His Cambodian wife, their two-month-old daughter and his wife’s sister all suffered minor cuts and went Calmette Hospital for treatment, he said.
Sun Srey Poa, a housekeeper who worked at the Favour with Chhun Sakhon, said she was cleaning room 404 when the bomb went off. She said she heard “a big crash,” before the ceiling collapsed in around her. She pulled herself from the rubble to look for Chhun Sakhon, but could not find her.
The first blast sent shattered glass across Monivong Boulevard and destroyed the northern wall of the hotel’s second floor. Bricks and concrete rubble filled a narrow alley on the hotel’s north side. Huge windows on the front of the 7-floor building were shattered as high as the sixth floor. The bomb also blew in the wooden wall of a second-floor house next to the hotel, injuring two construction workers and a woman cutting vegetables in her home in the alley behind the Hong Kong Hotel.
Police said 10 of those wounded in the two blasts were taken to Calmette Hospital, while one police officer, injured from flying glass in the first explosion, was taken to a private health clinic. A baby boy was in critical condition at the hospital, doctors said, but they would not identify the child.
The Hong Kong Hotel has been the scene of a bombing before. In August of 1999, authorities detonated a 200 g bomb made from TNT and left under a car parked in front of the hotel.
The Hong Kong Hotel carried insurance from the Forte Group, with an $800,000 policy, a Forte employee said. However, the hotel was not insured against bombs or explosions.
The Favour’s insurance information was not immediately available.
Wednesday’s threatening phone call to the Favour was the third warning hotel management had received in the last 24 hours, Thav Kimlong said.
Late Tuesday evening, the hotelier and government official said, he received two phone calls from a feminine voice demanding $100,000 and threatening to blow the hotel up.
Because the woman spoke in “impolite” terms, Thav Kimlong said, he assumed it was a prank and he turned off his mobile phone.
“I didn’t know the situation was like this,” he said upon arriving at the scene of the blast.
On the fourth floor of the Favour, twisted metal, chunks of concrete, and gray dust covered the hallway. Broken glass, hanging electrical wires and broken water pipes lay everywhere. A 1-meter-wide hole lay on the floor at the entrance to Room 410, and a desk teetered out of that room’s blown out wall. At least one blackened body, its clothes blown off, was visible in the midst of the rubble.
Goey, a middle-aged tourist from Germany who would not give his last name, was staying on the 6th floor of the Favour when the second explosion went off.
“I came here today and that was my welcome,” he said. “It is a pity. This news will go around the world and it will be a blow to Cambodia’s future. I have been telling my friends they should come here.”
(Additional reporting by The Cambodia Daily staff.)
