A 49-YEAR-OLD man was charged this week over the rape and murder of woman in Battambang’s Phnom Proek district in 2007.

Thol Yothea, a police chief of juvenile protection unit of the province’s Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection Bureau, said yesterday that the man had been sent to court on Monday following his arrest on Sunday.

“He has been detained in the provincial prison to await a hearing,” he said.

The suspected killer was caught after he returned to his home town for Khmer New Year despite an outstanding arrest warrant against him, officials said.

Sim Sopheak, deputy police chief of Phnom Proek district, said that the 45-year-old woman was killed on April 24, 2007, while her husband was working in another province.

It is believed that while walking to and from a market, she was attacked twice by a rapist.

During the second attack, it is alleged that the suspect murdered her before throwing her body into a forest, around 200 metres from her home. Villagers later found the body and informed police, but the main suspect in the case had fled.