A woman has confessed to plotting the sale of two virgins in Battambang province, police said.
Sngun Chanthou, 33, was arrested Dec 30 and charged with human trafficking, said Chea Thon, deputy chief of police in Battambang.
He said the woman admitted to planning to sell two girls, ages 12 and 14, for sexual exploitation. Negotiating with an undercover police officer at a Battambang hotel, she set a price of $350 and $178 for the girls, Chea Thon said.
The girls were brought to Battambang for sale by their mothers, he said. Police later warned the mothers, but did not file charges, he said, adding that the girls were returned to Phnom Penh.
In an unrelated case, Judge Ham Mengse on Saturday ordered the detention of Blake Alan Respiny, 47, as police continue investigating allegations that he had sex with underage boys several times last month in Battambang.
Anti-trafficking police arrested Respiny on Dec 29 after he was discovered with two naked 14-year-old boys in a guest house. He was transferred to the custody of Phnom Penh immigration police on the order of National Police Director General Hok Lundy.
He was charged with debauchery and rape on Friday.
At least five foreign nationals were charged with sex crimes in Phnom Penh last year, said Meng Say, chief of the municipal anti-trafficking department.
Most of those arrests came late in the year. Last month, Richard Arthur Schmidt, a 61-year-old from the US, was charged with two counts of debauchery in less than a week.
Only days before Schmidt was arrested, French national Olivier Frenoy was apprehended and charged with debauchery after police raided his guest house room and found him in the company of two young boys. Both men are in jail awaiting trial.
The anti-trafficking department in the capital was created in July 2002 and reported two cases involving foreigners for the remainder of that year.
Another debauchery case, involving a German citizen, was reported in Sihanoukville last year, said Pong Sokha Roth, administrator of the municipality’s anti-trafficking department.
And Siem Reap province reported one foreign sex offender, said Sun Bunthong, provincial chief of the anti-trafficking department.
Forty-five sex crimes were reported in that province—75 percent of all crimes committed there, he said.
