Confronted with what prosecutors claimed was a notebook listing the names of drugs, drug buyers and prices, an accused in a $3 million drug case has claimed they were actually shorthand “cooking ingredients”.

Cambodian Liv Seu, 42, and Chinese nationals Ly Yon aka Che, 43, and Toeng Yangphing, 53, appeared yesterday in Phnom Penh Municipal Court charged with drug production, processing and possession charges.

The alleged ringleader, Dam Nha, is being tried in absentia after evading arrest.

A senior police officer alleged the group was the “biggest” cartel in Cambodia at the time of their arrest in June 2015, after they allegedly smuggled nearly 55 kilograms of methamphetamine and heroin from Laos into Cambodia.

Seu’s wife Phal Rany, also known as KK, is also on trial, charged with joining a cartel...
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/l ... gs-accused

The trial of five suspected drug traffickers – including three Chinese nationals – implicated in the largest methamphetamine cache ever seized in Cambodia finished at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court yesterday, with verdicts to be released on August 18.

Four of the five suspects were arrested after police linked them to a seized $3 million, 55kg cache of heroin and methamphetamine last year. The fifth suspect is still at large.

At the trial’s end, the court’s substitute prosecutor asked the judge’s council to uphold all charges despite innocent pleas by the accused.
The professions of innocence were in stark contrast to confessions given by the four while in police custody, when they each admitted to the crimes...


He [Maj. Gen. Suthy] explained that while four of the suspects were arrested on June 16 and 17 last year, Ms. Rany and her husband’s arrest on the first day set the others in motion.
Although the couple lived in Phnom Penh, Mr. Su was in Stung Treng province when he was arrested in March for suspected drug use and detained in the provincial prison.

Two months later while his wife, Ms. Rany, was in the province visiting him, Mr. Su called her on a prison telephone, telling her she needed to move a cache of drugs from their home in the capital’s Russey Keo district to their second home in Chamakarmon district.

When police became aware of the conversation, they arrested Ms. Rany immediately.

“Based on Phal Rany’s confessions during questioning, our officers identified three other Chinese suspects and later arrested two of them – Li Yong and Deng Yuan Ping in Phnom Penh. But another suspect, Dam Nha, escaped,” Maj. Gen. Suthy said...

“Police found a small package of drugs” on me, he added, explaining that the package contained crystal meth.

“Those drugs belonged to me, but I kept them for personal use,” he said. “I have a brain tumor.

Through their investigation, police discovered that a fifth, previously unidentifiied suspect was the leader of the drug trafficking ring that smuggled the meth and heroin into Cambodia from the Golden Triangle, Major General Sothy added.

He identified the man as Dam Nha. On trial earlier this month, Ms. Rany said Mr. Nha, a rubber farmer, was her lover, and that he kept the drugs at their shared apartment without her knowledge. During the same hearing, she said she falsely implicated herself and her boyfriend after discovering that he too was having an affair.