Medical Fraud

Police in Kandal province’s Kien Svay district are preparing to send documents to the provincial court requesting the arrest of a married couple after the wife allegedly posed as a doctor and lethally injected a 70-year-old man with a serum.

Kim Ratana, the deputy district penal police chief, said Hok Setha, 70, died just four minutes after the injection on Sunday, and that the couple promptly fled the scene. “We reached the couple’s house too late, because they left their house during the night after the man died,” he said. Kim Ratana said the couple had recently opened a medical practice in the district’s Dey Ith commune.

Commune chief Suth To said yesterday that the suspects were still at large.

Phan Siha, the victim’s nephew, said the family was visited by someone claiming to be a representative of the couple following his uncle’s death.

“The representative of the suspects came to meet us, and offered to pay us only US$2,000 for the death of my uncle, but we could not accept it,” he said. “A person’s life is not something you can sell or buy.”