A woman was killed and three others were severely injured when a bus collided with a truck transporting cattle and careened into a tailor shop in Kompong Chhnang in the early hours of Monday morning, officials said.
The woman, who is yet to be identified, was thrown through the windshield of the Paramount Angkor Express bus as the vehicle was en route to Poipet City in Banteay Meanchey province from Phnom Penh, said Kompong Chhnang provincial traffic police chief Ea Bunthoeun.
“The dead woman is being kept at the provincial hospital to wait for relatives to transport her home and the three injured passengers were sent to hospitals in Phnom Penh by their relatives,” he said.
Mr. Bunthoeun added that the drivers of the bus and the cattle truck, which collided in Rolea Ba’ier district’s Pongro commune, had fled the scene after the accident.
“We are now building a report for this accident in order to make the bus driver responsible for the death and the injured people and we already telephoned to [Paramount Angkor Express] to inform them about the accident,” he said.
Last year, a spate of serious tour bus accidents, including three in one month involving Paramount Angkor Express and its partner company, Rith Mony Transport Co., led the Ministry of Public Works and Transport to announce that bus companies guilty of speeding, breaking traffic laws or causing injury to passengers would risk losing their license after three accidents.
Paramount and Rith Mony have since used their three strikes, though neither have had their license revoked.
“If one company causes many deaths in an accident, we would report it to the upper level to ask for a decision on whether to shut the company down,” said Preap Chanvibol, director of the public works department at the Ministry of Public Works and Transport.
Som Vichet, manager at Paramount Angkor Express, said that accident investigations were the duty of its insurer, the Cambodian National Insurance Company (Caminco).
“We offered this problem to [Caminco] to solve it because we buy insurance from this company,” he said.
