Hostage drama casts shadow over Cambodian tourism
More than a million tourists visited war-scarred Cambodia last year, most of them drawn by the ancient wonders of Angkor Wat.
But this week’s hostage drama, including the murder of a Canadian toddler, at an international school in Siem Reap, gateway to the famed 800-year-old temples, casts a shadow over the country’s tourist boom, one of its few economic success stories.
Masked gunmen held 29 infants hostage for eight hours before police and troops stormed the school, which catered to the offspring of the scores of expatriates working in the hotel industry in the sleepy town.
One of the gunmen shot the two-year-old Canadian boy in the head when hostage negotiators refused to hand over guns and grenades, a police investigator told Reuters.
“Siem Reap is a lovely place. Everyone here is shocked and horrified because you don’t expect something like this to happen here,” said Briton Karl Balch, owner of the Ivy Bar and Guesthouse who has been living in the town for six years.
The hostage-takers appear to have no motive apart from money, suggesting it was a one-off incident. But residents said there would be a profund impact on foreigners who had been living in a secluded provincial idyll, insulated from local memories of a decades long civil war.
“The expat community is going to be severely affected by this, but to Khmers it’s just another day,” said David Cowled, an aid worker for one of the many organisations helping clear up after the civil war.
Both tourists and bar and hotel owners predicted visitor numbers, which topped the one million mark for the first time in 2004, would be affected.
More: reuters.co.in