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.
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