(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has condemned the murder of a journalist from the royalist Cambodian opposition radio station Ta Prum and called on the government to set up an immediate independent inquiry to find and punish those responsible. Chuor Chetharith, the station’s deputy editor-in-chief, was shot dead by two men on a motorcycle in front of […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has condemned the murder of a journalist from the royalist Cambodian opposition radio station Ta Prum and called on the government to set up an immediate independent inquiry to find and punish those responsible.
Chuor Chetharith, the station’s deputy editor-in-chief, was shot dead by two men on a motorcycle in front of the station’s Phnom Penh studios as he was getting out of his car on 18 October 2003. He was hit in the neck. Prime Minister Hun Sen had warned the station four days earlier to “better monitor its programmes” after it had criticised him extensively.
“If the government is to regain its credibility, it is vital to end the impunity enjoyed by those who kill journalists,” RSF Secretary-General Robert Ménard said in a letter to Prime Minister Hun Sen.
King Norodom Sihanouk condemned the murder and immediately suspended the negotiations he was chairing to form a new coalition government between Hun Sen’s majority Cambodian People’s Party (PPC, in power for nearly 20 years) and the Democratic Alliance of the royalist FUNCINPEC, which had links to the radio station and the Sam Rainsy Party. Chou Chetharith was a member of FUNCINPEC. The PCC failed to win an absolute majority in parliamentary elections on 27 July.
The king said on his Internet website that the killing was “politically motivated” and complained that “in 99 percent of cases, those responsible are not found and go unpunished.” Six journalists were killed in the country between 1994 and 1997 and none of the cases have been solved.
