A Ministry of Interior employee was arrested yesterday and will face court for threatening Prime Minister Hun Sen and will also incur disciplinary action for attending an opposition rally, a spokesman said.

Leang La, who works at the Ministry of Interior's general department of logistics and finance, was called for questioning after he left a post on Hun Sen’s Facebook page warning him that he would soon be “meeting his maker” and that his family should go into “exile before 2018”.

“Your . . . fate is die to or to be in jail that cannot be avoided,” the post read.

Interior Ministry spokesman Khieu Sopheak said La confessed and would be sent to court for “threatening the lives of the premier’s family”, but did not specify what charges he would face. He said La would also be punished for attending an election rally held by the Cambodia National Rescue Party, which he said violated the requirement of neutrality in the police’s disciplinary codes.

The law governing civil servants does forbid using state positions or facilities to work for or against a political party. However, the new Elections Law, passed in 2015, allows civil servants to campaign out of office hours and out of uniform, which La was at the time, according to a photo on his Facebook.

Bureaucrats and state security forces have long been accused by the opposition of campaigning for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party but have faced no similar repercussions.