A man was beaten to death by an unidentified group of people shortly after midnight on Wednesday on the Kab Srov dam in Kouk Roka commune in the capital’s Prek Pnov district. The police are attempting to ascertain if it was a revenge attack.
On Wednesday, Prek Pnov district police chief Chin Kimthuy identified the victim as 34-year-old Soth Sambo, also known as Mao.
He said Sambo was a resident of Prek Pnov district’s Kouk Roka commune. Police have handed over the body to his family after examining it.
“The victim’s body was handed over to his relatives. Our police are continuing to look for the assailants and bring them to justice,” Kimthuy said.
Citing residents nearby the crime scene, he said that just after midnight, they heard a group of people making a commotion and a motorbike revving.
They were immediately suspicious, Kimthuy said, and went to investigate. When they arrived at the scene, the residents saw a man lying face down with blood pouring from his head, with a motorbike lying on the ground not far from the body.
Having been alerted by the residents, Prek Pnov district police arrived at the scene and examined the body. Kimthuy said the police suspected that the victim’s head had been fractured by a hard object.
He said the victim’s wife, Chies Chan, who is the Kouk Roka commune police chief, told him that her husband was a motorbike taxi driver.
She told Kimthuy that the night before the incident, Sambo had left their house on his motorbike but she was unaware of where he had gone.
Chan searched for her husband until midnight everywhere she could think of, but could not find him. At midday on Wednesday, the police informed her that her husband had been killed.
Kimthuy said the back of the victim’s head had been hit by what he thought was a hard object, resulting in an approximately 15cm-long fracture of the skull.