/ 25 October 2004

Cambodia’s underwear gang strikes again

Cambodia’s notorious underwear thieves have struck again, shooting and seriously wounding a motorbike taxi driver just outside the capital, local media said on Monday.

The gang earned its name because its members wear nothing but underpants, but wield AK-47s. It terrorised communities in several provinces last year but had appeared to have disbanded until the attack on Sunday, Khmer-language Kampuchea Thmei said.

Chea Cheoun (23) was shot in the left shoulder as he tried to outrun two underwear-clad thieves with his motorbike about 60km outside the capital, the paper quoted his brother Keo Veasna as saying. Police were not called, he added.

The failure by police to apprehend the gang last year earned it hefty criticism from some sectors of the community, which asked why they could not identify and stop such distinctively uniformed robbers. — Sapa-DPA