A 49-year-old American pastor was shot and lightly wounded by an unidentified gunman outside his Phnom Penh home on Wednesday evening, in what he described as an attempted assassination.
Bruce McKee, of Dallas, Texas, received a bullet wound to his left ear at about 8 pm while sitting in his Toyota Land Cruiser, which was parked in the driveway of his home on Street 95.
After being taken to Calmette Hospital, McKee, a pastor at Christ Light Baptist Church, declined comment on what might have motivated an attempt on his life, and said he had been advised not to discuss his problems.
“I’m just following the advice of somebody I know and trust…. I want to cooperate but I can’t,” he said.
Seated outside the hospital’s emergency room, McKee, who has been working in Cambodia for seven years, told a police official that he was preparing to back his car out of the drive when, after turning on his radio, he saw a man approach the driver’s window. “I rolled down the window,” he recalled. “I smiled at him and he put a gun in my face.”
“He tried his best to kill me,” McKee said of his lone assailant, whom he described as a man of about 25.
McKee could not say how many shots had been fired, but said that he avoided them by leaning in different directions.
“I’m a Christian missionary so I don’t have much confidence in luck,” he said. “I do believe I have an angel watching over me.”