Cambodian police yesterday arrested a man identified by Thai police as the main suspect in the brazen daylight assassination of a former Cambodian opposition MP in Bangkok.
Lim Kimya, a former lawmaker for the banned Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), was shot twice at around 4 p.m. on Tuesday close to Wat Bowonniwet Vihara in the city’s Phra Nakhon district. He died at the scene.
In a statement yesterday, the Cambodian National Police confirmed that they arrested Ekkalak Pheanoi in Battambang province in western Cambodia yesterday afternoon, a day after the killing. The suspect will be extradited to Thailand to be questioned, and possibly charged, by the Bangkok Metropolitan Police, it added.
The suspect reportedly escaped to Cambodia through Sa Kaeo province after the killing. According to Khaosod English, the CCTV footage captured him at the Khao Din Permanent Border Crossing Point late on Tuesday.
Ekkalak, also known as Sergeant M, had “a troubled history in the Thai Navy, where he had been disciplined with detention twice, in 2021 and 2022,” Khaosod English reported. “In 2023, he was dismissed from service after being charged with absence without leave.” It added that he had been working as a motorcycle taxi driver and running errands for local vendors before the incident.
Earlier yesterday, Bangkok issued a warrant for his arrest. Siam Boonsom, chief of Bangkok police, told reporters that the initial investigation led them to believe the suspect was hired to carry out the shooting, the Associated Press reported. He said that Lim Kimya had likely been identified as the gunman by another person. The Thai police also released a photo of this second suspect, a man in a white t-shirt who they believe to be a Cambodian national.
Kimya, 73, was elected to parliament in the national election of July 2013, when the CNRP, a new party formed from the merger of two existing opposition parties, came close to toppling the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). After another strong showing in commune elections in mid-2017, the party was dissolved by the Supreme Court. Most of its leadership, many of whom hold dual citizenship, subsequently fled into exile abroad. Kimya was one of the few former MPs who remained, even though he held French citizenship and easily could have fled abroad.
The arrest took place amid a chorus of calls for a thorough and independent investigation into Kimya’s apparent assassination. “It is imperative the French government closely monitors this process to ensure transparency and real justice is served,” said Monovithya Kem, the daughter of former CNRP President Kem Sokha, who is currently serving a lengthy term of house arrest on bogus “treason” charges.
In a post on X, Sam Rainsy, a former opposition leader in exile in France, put the blame squarely on the ruling CPP and former Prime Minister Hun Sen. “Hun Sen is behind the assassination of Lim Kimya, as he was behind the killing of Kem Ley in 2016,” he wrote. “He tried to kill me in 1997 and is behind a series of other political murders in Cambodia.”
Kem Ley was a popular political activist and commentator who was shot dead at a petrol station in Phnom Penh on July 10, 2016. Kimya’s killing bears a number of striking similarities to the assassination of Kem Ley. In that case, too the police arrested a former soldier, a man named Oeuth Ang, who was alleged to have murdered the activist over an unpaid $3,000 debt. Even if he pulled the trigger, many critical observers believe that Oeuth Ang’s story was suspect and that he was likely a scapegoat for a political killing ordered by individuals in or close to the Cambodian government. As a coalition of local and international human rights groups put it on the fifth anniversary of Kem Ley’s killing in 2021, “there has been no independent, impartial and effective investigation to establish whether anyone else was involved in the killing.”
The fact that the Thai authorities are in charge of this case, rather than those in Cambodia, increases the likelihood of a proper investigation. But there are a number of reasons to be skeptical that the true culprits will be apprehended, let alone identified publicly. Recent years have seen an alarming increase in the disappearance, killing, intimidation, and deportation of exiled dissidents across mainland Southeast Asia. The Thai government has been particularly aggressive in this regard, clamping down on foreign dissidents living in the country in exchange for reciprocal actions by its neighbors against Thai political exiles.
One corollary of this mutually beneficial quid pro quo is that neither government has much incentive for investigators to probe killings and disappearances too closely. When the Thai dissident Wanchalearm Satsaksit disappeared after being kidnapped off the street in Phnom Penh in 2020, the Cambodian authorities followed with an investigation that Amnesty International described as “negligent.” (No culprit has ever been identified.) Due to this quid pro quo, the Thai government would thus arguably have an interest in this case to conclude that the killing resulted from a personal dispute, or at any event, to stop short of identifying the true culprits.
Assuming the assassin presents police with a convincing cover story, it is unlikely that metropolitan investigators will have the dedication to dig further into the case, especially if it leads into diplomatically fraught territory across the Cambodian border.