Khmer Rouge guerrillas jailed for Briton's murder

FOR 12 long years, the family of a British man kidnapped and murdered by Khmer Rouge guerrillas had campaigned for justice.

Yesterday, justice was finally done when they saw three former Khmer Rouge soldiers sentenced to 20 years each in jail by a Cambodian court for executing Christopher Howes and his translator, Houn Hourth.

The men worked for British charity the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) and were abducted as they cleared mines near the temple complex of Angkor Wat in March 1996.

A fourth man was jailed for ten years for his part in the crimes, but a fifth was released after the judge accepted he had been forced at gunpoint to lead the rebels to the place where they could ambush Mr Howes.

Yesterday, MAG welcomed the verdict and said the families of both victims were "extremely satisfied" with the outcome so long after the event.

Lou McGrath, the group's chief executive, said: "We feel that justice has been done for our two colleagues, who were brutally murdered whilst carrying out life-saving work."

For two years, as Pol Pot's regime spiralled into collapse, the fate of Mr Howes, a former British Army engineer from Backwell in Somerset, remained a mystery.

A Scotland Yard investigation uncovered the ashes of the victims' remains and established the pair had been killed three days after being kidnapped.

Then, the trail seemed to go cold, despite Mr Howes' father and MAG lobbying the media and diplomats for action.

Finally, in 2002, George Cooper, an American legal aid lawyer based in Cambodia, took up the case in his spare time and painstakingly combed through the evidence for six years until he had enough to put the suspects on trial.

However, it was not until last year that five men were arrested and charged. Khem Ngun – by then a brigadier general in the Cambodian army – Put Lim, Sin Dorn, Loch Mao and Cheap Chet were charged with the abduction and murder of Mr Howes and Mr Houn and the kidnap of 20 other members of Mr Howes' team.

They blamed the crime on two other guerrillas who are believed to be dead, but Khem Ngun, Loch Mao and Put Lim were convicted on all charges.

The 20 other mine clearers were freed after Mr Howes agreed to remain with their captors as surety for a future ransom. But he and Mr Houn were shot dead within a week after a last meal of apples and the tropical fruit durian, Cambodian prosecutors told the trial.

The court heard Mr Howes had been killed on the orders of Pol Pot because the communist leader had a blanket policy of killing foreigners on the grounds that they supported the Cambodian government. Mr Houn was murdered a day earlier, when he was deemed "no longer necessary" because one of the accused spoke English.

Khem, who subsequently defected from the Khmer Rouge, denied that he had ordered the shooting. He told the court: "Another Khmer Rouge soldier ordered the shooting of Howes in the head, and then I turned my face away and felt shock."

Mr Howes served seven years in the Royal Engineers before working for MAG in northern Iraq and then Cambodia. His courage in refusing to leave his co-abductees earned him a posthumous Queen's Gallantry Medal, and King Noradom Sihanouk of Cambodia has named a street in the capital after him.

BACKGROUND

THE court in Phnom Penh heard how Christopher Howes was murdered in the Cambodian jungle.

After being interrogated in a school building, the British de-miner was executed on the orders of Khem Tem, a Khmer Rouge commander who has since died.

One of the accused men, Loch Mao, told the court that Khem Tem ordered another soldier, Nget Rim, to kill Mr Howes.

Loch said: "Howes fell backward. It was one single shot. Khem Tem then ordered me to fire more shots. I walked up with the intention of firing a shot into his chest, but Khem Ngun yelled, 'That's enough, he is already dead'."

Another of the accused men, Put Lim, said that Mr Howes' body was cremated on a wood fire.