High School Closed After Deadly Secret Found Buried Near the Building
Cambodian authorities have temporarily closed a high school where thousands of pieces of unexploded ordnance from the country’s nearly three decades of civil war have been unearthed.
The ordnance was found at the school in the northeastern province of Kratie after de-miners were called in to search for buried landmines on the campus before a new building was constructed, according to Chheang Heng, the provincial deputy chief for education.
More than 1,000 students attend Queen Kossamak high school.
The site was an ammunition warehouse during the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s before being turned into a school and all of the ordnance was thought to have been removed, Chheang Heng said.
Cambodia: Thousands of war-era explosives found buried at high school https://t.co/eQXgXtn9pl
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) August 13, 2023
From Friday through Sunday, 2,116 pieces of ordnance were collected by de-miners from the Cambodian Mine Action Center, the government agency’s director general, Heng Ratana, posted on Facebook
The explosives included M79 grenades, FuzeM48 shells and ordnance for the B40 rocket launcher.
Photos posted on its Facebook page showed the dirt-covered items placed in a row on the school’s campus.
Heng Ratana said many more pieces of ordnance are believed to still be buried, so the school will be closed for some days while the de-miners work to collect the dangerous material.
“I know that this school site used to be a big ammunition warehouse of the Khmer Rouge in late 1970s, but I could not believe that there was a huge amount of ammunition buried underground like this,” Chheang Heng said.
“How many casualties would have happened if this ammunition exploded?” he said.
#Deminers discovered more than 2,000 #explosives, including more than 1,000 M79 #grenades, inside the grounds of a high #school in Kratie province over three days, said Mr. Heng Ratana, director-general of the #Cambodian #Mine #Action #Centre. #Cambodia pic.twitter.com/Dk7hr1cuko
— UK Tutoring Services (@TutorCambodia) August 13, 2023
The brutal rule of the radical communist Khmer Rouge was blamed for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodian from starvation, illness and execution between 1974 and 1979, before it was ended by a Vietnamese invasion.
Three decades of war finally ended in the late 1990s but left Cambodia littered with an estimated 4 million to 6 million land mines and other ordnance.
Most has been cleared, but the explosives continue to kill.
Since the end of the fighting, nearly 20,000 people have died and about 45,000 have been injured by leftover war explosives, although the average annual death toll has dropped from several thousand to less than 100.
The Cambodian government aims to clear all the nation’s leftover land mines and unexploded ordnance by 2025.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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