Speaking via video-link at a ceremony on Wednesday marking the 19th anniversary of the 1997 grenade attack in Phnom Penh, self-exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy announced that a French court had re-opened an investigation into the deadly attack he has long blamed on Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Unidentified assailants lobbed four grenades into a protest being held by Mr. Rainsy near the old National Assembly in March 1997, killing at least 16 and injuring more than 120, one of the worst mass killings in the country’s modern era. No one has ever been prosecuted for the attack.
“I remember on March 30, 1997, we gathered here to demand justice, to demand independent courts…and democracy, and now everything that we wanted we still do not have,” Mr. Rainsy said, projected via Skype on a screen at the ceremony.
Yet Mr. Rainsy assured the crowd that the investigations into the attack were not over, announcing the reopening of a court case previously brought in France that had been suspended.
“A French court in Paris has re-opened this case because there was a new development that they put in the case file,” he said.
“They are independent, they’re very professional, they have the means and they do not serve anybody and they are not scared of anyone,” he added. “So it’s not just for Khmers. The whole world remembers that it was terrorism manipulated by the state.”
Mr. Rainsy said in a subsequent email that the case was reopened in France last year, having been filed at the court by “victims,” but declined to specify what new evidence had come to light.
“There are new elements that the court may not see appropriate to disclose now,” Mr. Rainsy wrote.
It is not the first time a foreign court has moved to investigate the attack. A U.S. national injured by the explosions filed a suit with the New York district court in the 2000s accusing Mr. Hun Sen of responsibility.
CNRP lawmaker Real Camerin pays his respects to those killed in a March 1997 grenade attack on an opposition protest, during an anniversary commemoration in Phnom Penh yesterday. (Siv Channa/The Cambodia Daily)
The court agreed to investigate, but the complainant, late International Republican Institute country director Ron Abney, withdrew the complaint before the case was set to start in 2006 as part of a deal between Mr. Hun Sen and Mr. Rainsy to allow the opposition leader to return from self-imposed exile.
Due to Mr. Abney’s injury, the FBI investigated the case in the 1990s, with agents tentatively pointing the finger at Mr. Hun Sen’s personal bodyguards before releasing an inconclusive public report.
Witnesses to the attack claimed that authorities stationed around the protest formed a cordon behind the assailants after they threw the grenades and escaped, preventing anyone at the protest from following them.
CPP spokesman Sok Eysan said on Wednesday that any further investigation of the grenade attack would be welcome but that past foreign investigations had been short on evidence of who carried out the attack.
“We welcome it, but the FBI closed their investigation. They did not find their citizen had involvement in that event,” Mr. Eysan said, opening the door for French officials to come to Cambodia.
“They have to respect the laws in Cambodia if they want to come reinvestigate,” he said.
In the meantime, Mr. Rainsy appealed to his supporters to remember the deaths of their counterparts as next year’s commune elections and the 2018 national election draw near.
“We will succeed both with democracy and justice in 2017 and 2018,” he told those at the ceremony. “I appeal to all youth: Have a strong spirit and remember the sacrifices of the youth on March 30, 1997.”
(Additional reporting by Alex Willemyns)
