In a new batch of correspondence from July and August, released on Monday, U.N. human rights experts said they had received reports that Wanchalearm, a dissident affiliated with the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship who was allegedly abducted in front of a Chroy Changvar commune condominium on June 4, had traveled abroad and returned to Cambodia after 2017, despite the government claiming that the activist’s Cambodian visa expired on December 31, 2017.

In response to the U.N.’s July 15 letter, Cambodia’s permanent mission to the U.N. replied on August 12 reiterating previous claims: that Wanchalearm was not found to be living in Phnom Penh’s Mekong Gardens condominium, and that the Blue Toyota Highlander captured on surveillance footage was not registered with the Transportation Ministry.

The letter added that authorities had interviewed three witnesses, who “confirmed that there were no reports of abduction in the said area.”

Residents in the area told VOD earlier this month that they were aware of multiple eyewitnesses to the abduction.

CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Wed Dec 30, 2020 5:54 pm The sister of missing Thai activist Wanchalearm Satsaksit, Sitanan Satsaksit, is now back in Thailand after presenting her case to a Cambodian judge, but there is nothing new to report, and she is not optimistic.


A Thai dissident was kidnapped. When police had no answers, his sister began to investigate
By Shashank Bengali
Dec. 29, 2020
2 AM SINGAPORE —

Sitanan Satsaksit kneeled outside her brother’s apartment building, her eyes lowered in prayer beneath a wide-brimmed hat. As she tried to reconstruct the events of that evening six months earlier, she heard his distressed voice in her head.

They had been chatting on the phone, she back in their native Thailand and he in his adopted home of Cambodia. An outspoken democracy activist and satirist, 38-year-old Wanchalearm Satsaksit was among more than 100 Thai dissidents who had fled into exile following a 2014 military coup.

He told her he was buying meatballs outside his high-rise in Phnom Penh, the capital, when she heard a commotion, a series of bangs and shouts. Then came his plaintive cry, repeated again and again: “I can’t breathe.”

They were his last words before the line went dead.

Witnesses told local journalists they saw Cambodian-speaking men bundle the slight, bespectacled Wanchalearm into a dark blue Toyota Highlander and drive off along the riverside road. But authorities in Cambodia and Thailand have reported no progress in the investigation.

Human rights groups believe his kidnapping was part of a pattern of politically motivated disappearances in Southeast Asia, where authoritarian governments have often helped one another target dissidents in exile.
Full article: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/st ... -satsaksit

Splashback wrote: ↑Fri Jan 22, 2021 1:07 am Holy shit! He lives? And how about the others? That's great news.