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.
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