A group of revellers led by a man thought to be a Royal Cambodian Armed Forces soldier fired more than 50 bullets into the air in Kampot province on Saturday, wounding a neighbour, police said yesterday.
But investigators had yet to glean any more information about the perpetrators’ identities than the purported soldier’s first name, even though police said the man owned the property on which the shooting took place.
So Bunthoeun, Teuk Chhou district’s deputy police chief, said the AK-47 and handgun bullets were fired in two volleys – a burst of about 20 shots around 5pm and another round at about 6pm – on a mango farm belonging to a man villagers identified only as “Tum”.
The villagers told police that Tum and the others had arrived in four cars and a military pickup truck with a RCAF licence plate. Bunthoeun said he did not know how many people there were altogether.
They came “to drink at the farm, and shot at random”, he said. “They shot without any conflict happening. They shot just for fun. Then they left.”
Bunthoeun said a woman in a neighbouring commune had been struck in the heel by a bullet from an AK-47, but was in stable condition and recovering at home after a visit from a doctor. He said police had arrived at the farm later in the evening, and a search that night and in the morning had found 37 handgun bullet casings and 17 AK-47 bullets, both spent and unspent.
“So far, according our questioning of villagers, they only know him as Tum, but not the family name. They said Tum is a soldier living in Phnom Penh,” Bunthoeun said.
