SEOUL: South Korea will send a special team to Cambodia on Wednesday to discuss cases of fake jobs and scam centres involved in kidnapping dozens of its nationals, officials said a day after Seoul vowed to bring them all home.
The team, headed by the vice foreign minister, will depart Wednesday evening, according to a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
South Korea’s presidential office said Tuesday that 63 South Koreans were believed to have been detained in Cambodia, among 80 reported missing, and the government was “committed to bringing all South Korean nationals back home”.
Between January and August this year, 330 South Koreans were reported missing or detained against their will while in Cambodia, according to Seoul’s foreign ministry, with the safety of about 80 yet to be verified.
The government plans to “make every diplomatic effort to secure Cambodia’s cooperation”, the presidential office said, while “coordinating with relevant ministries to strengthen the embassy’s response capacity — including by increasing the number of police officials at the South Korean embassy in Cambodia”.
The response team includes officials from the police and South Korea’s spy agency, according to the presidential office.
South Korean police are set to “discuss with Cambodian authorities the repatriation of detained South Koreans” and conduct a joint investigation into the recent death of a South Korean college student, the presidential office has said.
The recent death of a Korean college student in Cambodia — reportedly kidnapped and tortured by a local crime ring — has shocked South Korea.
Police investigations and an autopsy showed the student, whose body was found in a pickup truck early on August 8, “died as a result of severe torture, with multiple bruises and injuries across his body”, according to a Cambodian court statement.
Three Chinese nationals were charged with murder and online fraud on August 11 and remain in pre-trial detention, the court said.
Many Korean victims of such crimes in Cambodia are said to have been lured by fraudulent job offers promising high pay, according to the South Korean government.
According to Amnesty International, abuses in Cambodia’s scam centres are happening on a “mass scale”.
There are at least 53 scam compounds in the country where organised criminal groups carry out human trafficking, forced labour, torture, deprivation of liberty and slavery, according to the organisation. – AFP
