Security was tight yesterday around a military base in southwestern Cambodia, a day after a huge explosion there killed 20 soldiers, wounded others and damaged nearby houses.
Guards sought to keep media away from the site in Kompong Speu Province.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet said on Facebook on Saturday that he was “deeply shocked” when he received the news of the blast in the province’s Chbar Mon Municipality. It was not immediately clear what caused it.
Photo: Reuters
A villager living nearby yesterday said that he trembled after hearing the blast, because he had never before experienced such a loud explosion.
“When the explosion happened, I was fixing my house with some construction workers,” Chim Sothea said. “Suddenly there was a loud explosion, causing my house to shake and breaking tiles on my roof. They fell down, but luckily they didn’t fall inside the house.”
Images from the scene showed several badly damaged buildings on the base, at least one with its roof blown off, and soldiers receiving treatment in a hospital. Other photographs showed nearby houses with holes in their roofs.
Four buildings — three for storage and one work facility — were destroyed and several military vehicles damaged, Colonel Youeng Sokhon said in a brief report to Royal Cambodian Army Commander General Mao Sophan on social media.
He added that 25 villagers’ homes were also damaged.
Photographs of the base showed the damaged structures in a large field, apparently with no civilian structures close by.
Another villager, who asked to be named only as Sophal, said he had heard a sharp sound, and when he saw smoke rising from the direction of the army base, he realized it was an explosion at the arms depot.
Sophal said he ran back to his house from the small shop where he sells food and drink to shelter inside with his wife and two children.
The military immediately closed the road to the base and “villagers were in a panic, seeking a safe place,” he said.
He moved his family to his parent’s home, farther away from the base, and when he returned to his own house hours later, he found it undamaged but other villagers’ houses had broken windows, doors and roofs, Sophal said.
Cambodia, like many countries in the region, has been suffering from an extended heat wave, and the province where the blast took place registered a high of 39°C on Saturday.
While high temperatures normally cannot detonate ammunition, they can degrade the stability of explosives over a period of time, with the risk that a single small explosion can set off a fire and a chain reaction.
Kiripost, an online English language news service, quoted villager Pheng Kimneang as saying a major explosion occurred at about 2:30pm, followed by smaller blasts for about another hour.
Hun Manet offered condolences to the soldiers’ families and promised the government would pay for their funerals and provide compensation both to those killed and those wounded.
A graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, he was army commander before he was elected last year to serve as prime minister, succeeding his father Hun Sen, who was Cambodian prime minister for 38 years before stepping down.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS