Military police arrested a suspect on Sunday in relation to a grenade attack that killed an 11-year-old boy in Phnom Penh’s Sen Sok district in October, officials said Monday.
Lieutenant Colonel Phan Daravuth, deputy chief of the Phnom Penh military police’s justice department, said that a 20-year-old man was arrested, but declined to provide further information.
“It is true that we arrested a suspect [Sunday],” he said. “But we cannot tell you any more right now because we are working…to arrest more [people].”
Lt. Col. Daravuth refused to say how many more suspects the police are searching for.
On October 9, real estate broker Sorn Sin, 56, was eating dinner with his family outside their home in Khmuonh commune when two men drove by on a motorbike and lobbed a grenade at them.
Mr. Sin’s son, Sin Dara, sustained extensive injuries and later died at Kantha Bopha Hospital.
Police arrested two men on the day of the attack, but later freed them after determining they were not involved in the crime.
James McCabe, a senior investigator with the Child Protection Unit, a police unit supported by the Cambodian Children’s Fund that is aiding police in its investigation of the grenade attack, said Monday that the two men arrested in the immediate wake of the attack turned out to be witnesses.
Mr. McCabe said Mr. Sin was involved in a “dispute” but declined to elaborate, explaining that providing detailed information about the case could jeopardize the ongoing investigation.
“The child was not the intended target; he was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.
Mr. Sin, who has maintained he does not know who may have wanted to harm him, also declined to discuss Mr. McCabe’s assertion that he was involved in a dispute.
“I won’t comment on that,” he said, explaining that he feared for his safety. “We are out in the open and [those responsible] are in hiding. I will let the authorities conclude their case.”
(Additional reporting by Alex Consiglio)
