French investigators are planning to return to Cambodia to continue to probe the 2012 murder of French expatriate Laurent Vallier and his four children, a court official said Thursday.
Their bodies were found inside a Land Cruiser submerged in a pond near the family home in Kompong Speu’s Chbar Mon City three months after they disappeared.
Cambodian police initially labeled it a murder-suicide by a desperate man, a conclusion Laurent Vallier’s family rejected, pointing to a bitter dispute between the dead man and his Cambodian in-laws.
French investigators visited Cambodia in March 2013 and immediately ruled out suicide, and then produced a 300-page report that Kompong Speu Provincial Court Judge Chhim Rithy said he received in July 2014, but was slow to have translated.
“The French are going to come soon and I just received a letter today from the Cambodian and French ministries of foreign affairs,” Judge Rithy said Thursday.
“They need to see the results of my questioning.”
The judge said that there was still no suspect in the murder case.
The French Embassy declined to comment as the investigation is ongoing.
