By Alex Consiglio
A raging fire tore through a ramshackle riverside community in Phnom Penh, less than 24 hours after a fire the previous evening destroyed a garment factory.
More pics are in the post…
By Alex Consiglio
A fire quickly spread through a garment factory in Phnom Penh, using the piles of clothes as tinder.
More pics in the post…
By Aun Pheap and Alex Consiglio
The Cambodia Daily
SVAY TEAP DISTRICT, Svay Rieng province- Seventeen garment workers and a driver died Tuesday morning when a bus rammed into an overloaded, 15-seat van carrying them and 21 others to work in Bavet City, officials said.
Duch Kahnaroth, a Svay Teap district police officer at the scene of the crash, said the accident occurred at about 7 a.m. and that 14 of the workers died at the crash site on National Road 1. Three more died of their injuries later in the day, while all 21 other passengers were injured.
“The bus was wrong because it tried to overtake a Camry car and hit the van,” Mr. Kahnaroth said. “The bus driver was arrested. He’s now detained at the district police station.”
He was later taken into custody by provincial police, according to Svay Rieng provincial police chief Koeng Khorn.
The driver of the van, who died at the scene of the crash, was transporting his passengers to the Tai Seng Special Economic Zone in Bavet City, where they worked at a number of different garment factories. The bus, which belongs to the 15 SH Transport company, was traveling from Vietnam to Phnom Penh.
By Alex Consiglio and Khy Sovuthy
The Cambodia Daily
When Roeun Hen would try to take a break from his 20-hour shift trawling Indonesian waters for fish, his Thai captain would pummel him, kicking and punching the 29-year-old until he returned to work.
After two years of the abuse, and without receiving the pay he had been promised, Mr. Hen made a dash for freedom when the boat docked at the remote Indonesian island of Benjina.
“I fled from the boat alone,” Mr. Hen said Thursday, noting that 10 other Cambodians had been forced to work on the boat with him. “I could not endure working on the boat anymore.”
Mr. Hen is among at least 58 Cambodians who were rescued from Benjina last Friday—along with hundreds of other slave laborers mostly from Burma—by the Indonesian government following an exposé by The Associated Press.
Speaking Thursday from the island city of Tual, where the Indonesian government is now caring for more than 300 freed fishermen with the help of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Mr. Hen said he had been tricked into working on the boat.
In 2009, Mr. Hen said he paid a broker in Poipet City, which borders Thailand, to smuggle him across the border for a well-paying job. The broker took him to a fishing boat, he said, where the Thai captain paid the broker and told Mr. Hen he would earn about $180 per month fishing Thai waters.
But the boat left Thailand’s Indonesia’s Maluku Islands, where Benjina operated as the hub for forced labor used on boats that fished Indonesia’s waters and transported the catch back to Thailand.
By Alex Consiglio and Hay Pisey
The Cambodia Daily
As the number of villagers testing positive for HIV continues to climb in Battambang province’s Roka commune, the Health Ministry is scrambling to rein in the illegal medical practices that may have led to the outbreak and are widespread throughout the country.
Two hundred and twenty-six villagers in Sangke district’s Roka commune have now tested positive for HIV since the commune health center began preliminary tests on December 8, deputy commune chief Soeum Chhom said Sunday.
Yem Chrin, an unlicensed doctor who often made house calls and treated his patients using injections, admitted to police that he reused syringes on multiple occasions, and was jailed on murder charges on December 22.
The cause of the outbreak remains unknown, but a government-led task force, which includes the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, is investigating possible sources of the epidemic and has sent blood samples abroad to determine whether the villagers’ infections share the same viral subtype, which can help narrow down the mode of transmission.
Medical experts say the reuse of syringes is unlikely to be the sole cause of the HIV outbreak, but that it is plausible a lone medical practitioner single-handedly spread the virus to hundreds of people if infection prevention protocols were not followed.
“This can happen anywhere,” said Ung Prahors, acting director of the Cambodian Health Committee, an NGO that provides assistance to villagers in poor communes suffering from AIDS and tuberculosis.