They trusted no one. They “expressed hatred and fear” towards “the corrupt government,” and said they were “frightened to the extreme,” begging the US investigators “not to tell the Cambodian police that they had seen anything.”
After the grenade attack in Phnom Penh 13 years ago today, which killed 16 people and wounded over 100, witnesses to the slaughter were interviewed by US Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at hotel rooms across Phnom Penh.
In administrative notes to their witness interview records, FBI Special Agents Thomas Nicoletti and Paul Hoffman frequently wrote that many of the informants “appeared highly reliable,” or “appeared credible and fearful of the situation.” Many did not want to cooperate with the Cambodian police because, as one man told the FBI, “I would be secretly killed.”
In its continuing disclosure of internal records from its investigation of a 1997 grenade attack on an opposition rally in Phnom Penh, the FBI in December released 40 unclassified records of interviews with witnesses, just over 30 of whom had experienced the attack and whose identities have been redacted by the FBI to protect both the witnesses and investigative sources.
While most of the records concern the six-week period of active FBI investigation in 1997, six FD-302 forms, or official FBI witness interviews, recounted apparently fruitless interviews conducted by other FBI agents again in May of 1999.
The witness statements were enclosed in the second release of records since the FBI last year began honoring a 2007 freedom of information act lodged by The Cambodia Daily.
The handful of witnesses who agreed to be interviewed at Cambodian police headquarters in 1997, including a policeman, three soldiers and a student, all provided little to no information of value, claiming not to have seen the attackers.
However the witnesses interviewed elsewhere by the FBI, including some who were bystanders and neighborhood residents, painted a consistent picture of the events of March 30, 1997: a team of three men lobbed four grenades into the crowd of about 200 people at 8:30 am. The crowd had gathered in the park opposite to what was then the National Assembly for a demonstration alleging corruption in the courts.
One of the grenade throwers wore a khaki suit, another a heavy jacket despite the stifling heat and a third had an unusual “Mao-style” hat redolent of the communist era.
Witnesses told the FBI the attackers’ retreat to nearby Wat Botum was protected by a line of military bodyguards that had been deployed to the rear of the opposition rally without official explanation.
According to the witnesses, the soldiers prevented survivors of the grenades from chasing the attackers down, threatening the pursuers, and according to one woman’s account, even shooting at least one wounded person dead.
One witness later observed two of the attackers exit Wat Botum and enter a nearby CPP military compound. Another witness described entering the compound and overhearing the soldiers discuss the attack. He also identified one of the men depicted in FBI composite sketches as a soldier at the base.
According to the latest FBI document disclosure, in room 401 of the Hawaii Hotel in Daun Penh district on April 29 1997 a man who said he was not an active supporter of Sam Rainsy, the rally’s organizer, told the FBI he had “grave concerns for his security and advised that he did not trust Cambodian police representatives of either party.”
The witness said that armed police withdrew from the scene before the rally began. As they left, he overheard them ask the demonstrators three questions:
“Why did you come here?”
“Do you want to die?”
“Who hired you to come?”
The soldiers who remained in a security perimeter were equipped with AK-47s, light machine guns and B40 rocket launchers.
According to the witness, one of the attackers “squatted and grabbed a grenade from his right side pocket with his right hand. He saw the subject move forward and toss a grenade underhanded into a crowd of people near a ‘sugar cane cart.'”
After the first explosion, the witness heard a voice from behind shouting “missed! missed!” At least one other witness also heard this remark.
As the attackers fled, the “military unit allowed the two subjects to pass through their lines and cross Street 7,” the witness told the FBI.
On May 8, a witness dubbed “Fingerprint Number One” as he had prepared a written statement marked with a fingerprint, told the FBI he was “in great fear” as a newspaper photograph had identified him as a witness to the attack.
“Incredibly,” the FBI records state, a Cambodian security agent present during the interview walked over to the witness “and without permission or saying a word, took a close-up full-face photograph of the witness.”
That photograph elicited a strong rebuke from the FBI agent present.
“The interviewing agent stood up and stated: ‘What the hell are you doing? The witness just stated that he was fearful for his life and you’re taking his picture! If you intimidate your citizens like this, it’s no wonder they don’t want to help you. If you embarrass me like this again, I’m recommending to my FBI superiors that we return to the United States!”
A person whose name was redacted from the record then “apologized,” saying the agent with the camera was an “intelligence officer” who “didn’t know any better.”
“The witness sitting directly across from the interviewing [FBI] agent shrugged his shoulders and looked as if to say: ‘See what I mean?'”
After the four explosions, people who had gone in pursuit of the attackers were stopped by the line of well-armed soldiers in the park, who said: “Move away or we will kill you.”
A woman under the protection of the Khmer Nation Party said in a May 21 interview that she had been standing near the detonation point of the third grenade, which caused the heaviest loss of life, but had improbably survived with wounds that were not life-threatening.
“The blast hit my right leg. My uncle was also injured. I heard him shouting, ‘a grenade, a grenade has been thrown.’ A soldier wearing a helmet shot him from behind. My uncle fell on the ground. I was scared. I ran to the west. The fourth grenade hit me in many places,” she told the FBI in an interview.
“When I was put on a car and brought to the hospital, I had my eyes closed and could only hear voices,” she said.
Four soldiers individually chosen by the Cambodian police investigating committee were interviewed at the Interior Ministry on May 13 but appeared to have remembered next to nothing of what happened.
A soldier stationed at the street said his orders were merely to secure the area. “Before the chaos, I think nothing,” he said. “I have no knowledge of anyone running across our lines,” he said, adding that, after the explosions, “I knelt down, I put my eyes to the grass and I didn’t look up. I saw nothing.”
Police Lieutenant General Khieu Sopheak, the Interior Ministry’s spokesman and the CPP liaison to the FBI during its investigation, said that he regretted the disclosure of the FBI’s latest documents.
“I think the failure of the investigation and the disclosure of the information outside the FBI is not professional,” Lt Gen Sopheak said.
“I don’t want my country going back to the situation that we have been experiencing,” he said. “What they are disclosing that is because they want Cambodian to go back.”
The release of the FBI witness notes to the 1997 were made under a 1966 US law requiring the review and release of federal government records upon request. Lt Gen Sopheak said FBI cooperation with Cambodia on all other matters was praiseworthy but that he remained suspicious of the release of the grenade attack records.
“My personal point of view was they have the intention to make Cambodia meet another bad experience,” he said. “Maybe someone behind this they try to get profit.”
The notes also reveal the FBI’s heavy workload in 1997 as, in addition to meetings with US and Cambodian officials, they sometimes conducted as many as six detailed witness interviews in a single day at various locations in Phnom Penh.
Invited by Funcinpec police officials to investigate the 1997 attack, the three-man FBI team, which included the forensic artist Michael Taister, also had jurisdiction under a US antiterrorism statute due to the injury of the American, Ron Abney, who was then Cambodia country director for the International Republican Institute.
The FBI team arrived in Phnom Penh in mid-April and their investigation soon focused on the role of the personal bodyguard force of then second-Prime Minister Hun Sen, who was then in a bi-partisan government with Funcinpec that was on the verge of violent schism.
Though members of the bodyguard unit were deployed to the park around the grenade attack site and are alleged to have allowed the suspected grenade throwers to pass through their security cordon, their commanders and members of the ruling party have denied any involvement by the unit in the March 30 violence.
“Significant” investigative results pointed in the direction of CPP involvement, according to Special Agent Nicoletti. However, due to reported threats against him, he was ordered to leave Cambodia on May 28 by the bureau’s diplomatic wing, the international relations branch, which coordinated foreign police cooperation and had no appetite for any investigation focusing on the Cambodian authorities themselves.
Dozens of planned FBI witness interviews were abandoned after Bangkok Legal Attache Ralph Horton, the FBI’s representative to Thailand and Cambodia, ordered Mr Nicoletti, then the only bureau representative in Cambodia, to leave Cambodia “on the next available flight.”
No arrests have ever been made in the 13-year-old case.
