Two children in Cambodia died after a rocket-propelled grenade buried since the civil war blew up near their homes.
The children, a girl and a boy both two years old, died after coming across the unexploded ordinance near their homes in rural northwestern Siem Reap province on Saturday.
The province's Svay Leu district was once a battle site for Cambodian government soldiers and Khmer Rouge fighters in the 1980s and 1990s.
Parents of Muo Lisa and her cousin, Thum Yen, were reportedly working at a far when the toddlers came across the grenade and it detonated. Experts from the Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMCA) determined afterward from fragments that it was a rocket-propelled grenade.
“Their parents went to settle on land that was a former battlefield, and they were not aware that there were any land mines or unexploded ordinance buried near their homes,” CMAC director-general Heng Ratana said. “It’s a pity because they were too young and they should not have died like this."
He said one child was killed instantly while the other succumbed at the hospital.
"The war has completely ended and there has been peace for more than 25 years, but the blood of Cambodian people continues to flow because of landmines and the remnants of war," Heng Ratana told AFP.
The blast took place after Cambodia was forced to partially suspend demining operations in the aftermath of US president Donald Trump's freeze on foreign aid for 90 days. Heng Ratana said Thursday he had been informed that Washington had issued a waiver allowing the aid – $6.36m (£5m)covering March 2022 to November 2025 – to resume flowing.
Cambodian deminers are among the world’s most experienced, and several thousand have been sent in the past decade under UN auspices to work in Africa and the Middle East.
Some four to six million land mines and other unexploded munitions are estimated to have littered Cambodia’s countryside during decades of conflict that began in 1970 and ended in 1998.
Since the end of the fighting in Cambodia, nearly 20,000 people have been killed and about 45,000 injured by leftover war explosives. The number of casualties has declined over time, but there were 49 deaths in 2024.
Last month, two Cambodian deminers were killed while trying to remove a decades-old anti-tank mine from a rice field.
