Kampot provincial police officials arrested one man on Tuesday and two more on Wednesday on suspicion of having gang-raped a French tourist in the early hours of Friday.
Kampot provincial police chief Mao Chanmathurith told The Post on Wednesday that a 37-year-old service driver from Sangkong village in Kampong Speu province’s Baset district was arrested on Tuesday.
Police arrested two more suspects on Wednesday, including a 19-year-old, also from Sangkong village, and a 23-year-old from Trapainglerk village in Kampot province’s Chhouk district. Both men are workers at Bokor Mountain.
Chanmathurith said the victim identified the first suspect arrested on Tuesday.
“When the victim identified the offender, he admitted that he and another two accomplices had raped her,” he said.
Police officials had been searching for the suspects after the victim first reported the crime on Saturday.
The victim told police that she left a bar at around 3am on Friday after an evening in Kampot town. As she walked down the street, the three men pulled up beside her and pulled her into their car before driving off to a different location where she was raped.
Following a two-hour ordeal, the men then dumped her from the vehicle at around 5am near Kampot town’s Durian Roundabout.
Police officials initially struggled to find footage of the crime as the woman, a tourist and therefore unfamiliar with her surroundings, had difficulty in providing an exact location of where she was abducted.
Police officials used specialist forces to identify the suspects, with Chanmathurith saying police uncovered clues to identify the men after a thorough investigation.
CCTV of the incident was eventually found and it showed the suspects slowly driving down the street before stopping near the victim. One of the suspects then waved over to the French woman to offer her a lift, which she declined.
The footage then showed the suspects pulling the woman into their car.
