Police have arrested three men in separate incidents for the alleged rape of young girls in Stung Treng and Banteay Meanchey provinces, and a rape and slaying in Battambang province.
Suspect Sok Thy, 16, was arrested on March 10 in Stung Treng’s Sekong commune in Siem Pang district, after he was accused of raping five girls, four of whom were 5, one of whom was 4.
“This is a historical crime for my province because the criminal raped five underage girls,” Chou Pi Chhoura, chief of the province’s penal police department, said Sunday.
“It was a disappointing case because the criminal tied the girls’ arms behind their backs and started to rape them one by one,” he said.
The five girls were playing on the grounds of a local pagoda when Sok Thy coaxed them to a nearby forest, Chou Pi Chhoura said.
He said the suspect climbed trees and picked tamarind fruit for the girls to eat before raping them.
“Those victims were so young. They did not know that the criminal had bad thoughts and plans for them,” Chou Pi Chhoura said.
He said Sok Thy confessed while being questioned by police, saying that he had wanted to know what sex was like.
Chou Pi Chhoura blamed a lack of education and the increasing exposure of pornographic videos for rape cases in Stung Treng.
“Especially the young youths are the group who want to try out and act out whatever they have seen,” he said.
In a separate case, Sum Laing, 26, was arrested Friday in Battambang’s Russei Kraing commune in Mong Russei district after authorities said that he raped and killed a 17-year-old girl on Thursday.
Sum Laing, a farmer, buried the girl in the rice field where he raped her, according to Seng Son, chief of the provincial police’s bureau of anti-trafficking and juvenile protection.
“The criminal used a hoe to beat the victim’s neck to kill her after he raped her and terrorized her,” he said Sunday.
Seng Son said the suspect confessed to the crime.
In a third case, a 44-year-old man was arrested Thursday in Banteay Meanchey’s Namtao commune in Phnom Srok district. Police allege that he has been raping his 17-year-old daughter over the past three years.
Chuon Vath, chief of that province’s anti-trafficking and juvenile protection bureau, said Sunday that the girl is seven months pregnant with her father’s child.
She was taken in on Friday by the Cambodia Women’s Crisis Center, he said.
