An award-winning Cambodian journalist known for his reporting on human trafficking in the cyberscam industry has been arrested, police said yesterday.
Mech Dara was presented last year with a Hero Award, which recognizes efforts against human trafficking, by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken for his investigations into exploitation at online scam compounds in Cambodia.
Authorities made the arrest on Monday after stopping a car carrying Dara and his family from Sihanoukville, a coastal city where many suspected scam operations take place, to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian Journalists Alliance Association (CamboJA) said in a statement.
Photo: AFP
Police confirmed the arrest and Y Rin, a spokesman at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court, said that an investigating judge had decided to detain Dara on charges of “incitement to cause serious chaos to social order.”
The charges relate to activity in Phnom Penh and social media posts last month, the spokesman said.
No further details on the charges or his current location were given, but Dara could face up to two years in jail if convicted.
The charge of incitement is frequently used by Cambodian authorities against activists.
Dara, whose work has appeared in various international news outlets, sent a message about his arrest to LICADHO, a human rights non-governmental organization, just before his phone was seized by military police.
A day before his arrest, Dara had posted an image on his social media platforms that purportedly showed a tourist site demolished to make way for a quarry, CamboJA said.
Local authorities labeled the now-deleted images “fake news” and called for Dara to face punishment for their publication.
Dara worked for independent media outlet Voice of Democracy before Cambodian authorities shut it down in February last year.
He has since used his social media platforms to share news content, particularly around the proliferation of notorious “scam farms” — criminal operations that defraud victims online for vast sums of cash and fuel human trafficking across the region.
Cambodia places near the bottom of international press freedom rankings, and rights groups have long accused the government of using legal cases as a tool to silence dissenting voices.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS