The Southeast Asian nation remains littered with discarded ammunition and arms from decades of war. (EPA Images pic)
PHNOM PENH: A Cambodian villager was killed after he drove a truck loaded with cassava over an anti-tank landmine on his farm, an official said on Saturday.
The incident happened in northwestern Battambang province on Friday when the unidentified villager “ran over an anti-tank landmine, the remnant of war,” Heng Ratana, director general of the government’s Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC), said in a Facebook post.
Two Cambodian deminers were killed on Thursday while trying to remove a decades-old anti-tank mine from a rice field that was once a battlefield between government forces and Khmer Rouge soldiers.
The Southeast Asian nation remains littered with discarded ammunition and arms from decades of war starting in the 1960s.
The US bombed swathes of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, a campaign that helped fuel the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.
During the nearly three decades of conflict that followed, millions of landmines were laid in Cambodia with tens of thousands of people killed or maimed over the years.
Deaths from mines and unexploded ordinances are still common, with around 20,000 fatalities since 1979, and twice that number wounded.
More than 1,600 square km (620 square miles) of contaminated land still needs to be cleared, which leaves approximately a million Cambodians affected by war remnants.
Cambodia, which previously aimed to be mine-free by 2025, has extended the goal by five years, Heng Ratana told AFP on Friday.
