Two children were killed by the explosion of an unfired rifle shell in a rice field in Battambang province on Friday afternoon, a district police officer said.

Captain Phong Sarin, district deputy police chief, said that Roeun Rith, 7, and Mann Marin, 7, “saw an unexploded bullet from a CKC [rifle] abandoned in a rice field near their village in Bavel district’s Khnach Romeas commune. They did not know what it was, so they took stones beating on it, and it immediately exploded”. They died immediately from severe injuries all over their bodies, he told the Post yesterday.

“This marked the second time … UXOs have exploded and killed people in Bavel district [this year],” he said. One boy was killed and three others injured when they threw stones at a B-40 rocket.

Captain Bun Roeun, deputy commander of Bavel district military police, called for more widespread education on UXOs and mines still lingering in the district since they were strewn there in the 1980s.