Two Cambodian deminers were killed while trying to remove a decades-old anti-tank mine from a rice field that was once a battlefield between government forces and Khmer Rouge soldiers, officials said.
The two deminers were killed on Thursday by “an old brutal hidden killer” while clearing mines in northwestern Oddar Meanchey province, the government’s Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC) said in a statement.
“This is the loss of professional experts who have contributed to the cause of peace, security and developing Cambodian people and the country,” CMAC said, identifying the victims as Pov Nepin and Ouen Channara.
The South-East Asian nation remains littered with discarded ammunition and arms from decades of war starting in the 1960s.The United States bombed swathes of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, a campaign that helped fuel the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.
During the nearly three decades of conflict that followed, millions of landmines were laid in Cambodia with tens of thousands of people killed or maimed over the years.
Deaths from mines and unexploded ordnance are still common, with around 20,000 fatalities since 1979, and twice that number wounded.
In 2018, an Australian and a Cambodian were killed when war-era ordnance exploded during a demining training exercise in southern Cambodia.
In August 2023, thousands of pieces of unexploded ordnance left over from past conflict were unearthed inside a school in the country’s northeast.
Prime Minister Hun Manet on Thursday shared his condolences with the families of the victims who “actively participated in mine-clearing operations in order to ensure that people live with safety after the war era”.
At an anti-mine conference in November held in Siem Reap, Hun Manet said that since 1992, Cambodia has cleared more than 3,000 sq km of landmines, destroying over a million anti-personnel mines and three million explosive remnants of war.
More than 1,600 sq km of contaminated land still needs to be cleared, he said, which leaves approximately a million Cambodians affected by war remnants.
Cambodia, which previously aimed to be mine-free by 2025, has extended the goal by five years, CMAC’s director general Heng Ratana said on Friday. — AFP