Backpackers’ Killer Arrested in Cambodia

Chhouk Rin, a former Khmer Rouge commander who was sentenced in absentia to life in prison for the 1994 murder of three backpackers, was arrested yesterday in Anlong Veng, Cambodia. Rin and his accomplices had abducted Australian David Wilson, Briton Mark Slater and Frenchman Jean-Michel Braquet from a Cambodian train traveling between Phnom Penh and the southern city of Sihanoukville, held the trio hostage for two months, then killed them. The travelers’ bodies were found in a shallow grave. Philip Gourevitch wrote about the events in the September 1995 issue of Outside magazine, and his story is still available online. It’s such a vivid piece of writing that when I read the news of Rin’s arrest today, Gourevitch’s story immediately came to mind, even though I read it 10 years ago.

Here’s a taste:

The train that Braquet, Slater, and Wilson boarded at the Phnom Penh station around dawn on July 26 of last year was a typically ominous example of Cambodian rolling stock—armor-plated and pocked with rusty gouges left by bullets and shrapnel. Two flatbed cars, fronted with a crude steel plow, were pushed ahead of the locomotive to absorb the explosion in the event that the track should be mined. Machine-gun nests were installed on the roof, where the trio perched for the view. A dozen or more members of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, toting AK-47s, mingled with the passengers above and below.

Part of the pleasure of adventure, of course, is defying timidity, and Braquet, Slater, and Wilson were not put off by the train’s battle-ready appearance. Still, none of the three could call himself an old Cambodia hand. David Wilson had been in the country the longest—almost a month. He had been up to the ruins of Angkor, the complex of temples dating from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries that marks the apex of Khmer civilization. Back in Melbourne, Wilson had been a social worker and coached a poor children’s soccer team. He’d sent word home that he was loving his trip, that he was charged with the excitement of a nation in flux.

Reuters and The Australian, among others, have news reports of Rin’s arrest.

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