A man was arrested and sent to court yesterday after a 25-year-old, wheelchair-bound woman was gang-raped in the grounds of a high school in Kandal province on Wednesday night.

A 22-year-old man was sent to the provincial court yesterday for questioning over the rape.

Police are searching for two other suspects, aged 22 and 23.

The victim, a polio sufferer from Sa’ang district’s Troeuy Sla commune, told the Post yesterday she had run into one of the suspects, her neighbour, outside a pagoda.

The suspect had insisted they spend more time together, but she had told him that she needed her mother’s permission to do so.

When the mother agreed to allow her to go back to the pagoda with the suspect, she went with him, but he took her elsewhere.

“We didn’t go back to the pagoda,” she said, adding that the suspect had taken her on a motorcycle to a nearby bridge where the two other suspects joined them.

“We turned off and went into the school ground, where I was repeatedly raped by two of the men,” the woman said.

“The police intervened before the third man could rape me.”

Sa’ang police chief Seng Socheat said police would continue searching for the two at-large suspects.

“One suspect, the driver of the motorbike, was sent to court following the arrest yesterday,” he said.

Socheat called the crime an unusually severe one and said he felt extremely sympathetic towards the victim.

Man Makara, provincial co-ordinating officer for the rights group Adhoc, said the victim had been taken to the Cambodia Women’s Crisis Centre in Phnom Penh.

She was now receiving care there, he said.

Man Makara urged the police to continue hunting for the remaining two suspects and called on the court to punish them if they were arrested.

“We will help the victim by finding a lawyer for her and we will offer assistance and care to her,” he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Khoun Leakhana at [email protected]