Does the US know who it's with dealing in Cambodia?

Opposition leader Sam Rainsy is rushed from the scene moments after a grenade attack on a political rally outside the parliament in Phnom Penh, March 30, 1997. Sixteen people were killed and more than 100 were injured in the explosions. (Reuters)

Absolutely, FBI files show.

December 20, 2009
By Douglas Gillison — Special to GlobalPost

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The local police not only failed to cooperate but actively tried to sabotage the FBI's investigation of Cambodia's worst peacetime atrocity.

Key evidence was doctored. Highly placed witnesses stormed out of interviews. Mischievous leaks to the media intensified threats to the FBI agents' safety. And according to the lead FBI investigator, who is now retired, Cambodian and US officials warned him that he was marked for assassination.

So much is written down in newly declassified FBI records from an investigation into the grenade attack on a peaceful opposition rally on March 30, 1997, which killed 16 children, men and women and wounded more than 100 others, including an American man. The FBI's disclosures were made this year under a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2007 by The Cambodia Daily, a local English-language newspaper.

No arrests were ever made. What evidence could be collected in the six weeks the FBI were actively investigating here pointed to forces loyal to the man who is now Cambodia's unchallenged prime minister, to the party and the people who now dominate Cambodia unopposed and with whom the U.S., and the FBI in particular, have since sought warm relations.

Please click here to read more...