MASSACRE REPORT

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32620, 31 May 1971, Page 13

MASSACRE REPORT

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) PHNOM PENH, May 30. Cambodian troops have discovered the bodies of 50 villagers massacred for refusing to work on Viet Cong road gangs during the last year, military sources say.

The sources say that the Viet Cong executed villagers, mainly males, in front of their families, 30 miles south of Phnom Penh, when they refused to dig ditches across Highway Three linking the capital to the coastal town of Kampot.

The sources say the villagers who lived under Communist control for a year until a Government advance down the highway last week, claimed that the Viet Cong had executed more than 200 people. Government troops are searching in fields near the hamlets along the road for the graves of the other villagers. The villagers had told the troops the Viet Cong warned them that if they refused to work on the

road they would be killed, the sources added. Threefoot long ditches have been dug into the paved road to hinder traffic movement. The ditches have, in fact, delayed the Cambodian advance down the highway to Kampot. The troops are trying to clear the highway to the coastal town, and then move westward along the coast road to Cambodia’s only deep-water port, Kompong Som.

The sources said that most of the massacre victims had their throats cut and their stomachs slit open.

The villagers told troops that during the Communist occupation they were confined to their hamlets and forced to pay taxes and feed the Viet Cong from their own supplies, the sources said.

Villagers returning to their homes behind the Government advance look gaunt and many are in need of medical care. Red Cross officials say they are undernourished and lacking salt.