Former Cambodian guerrillas described to a court yesterday the final moments of Christopher Howes, a British mine-clearance expert murdered by the Khmer Rouge in 1996.

The five former fighters, facing trial in the capital, Phnom Penh, all denied taking any personal part in the killings of Mr Howes and his translator, Houn Hourth, and blamed the crime on two other guerrillas who are believed to be dead.

The two victims, who worked for a British charity, the Mines Advisory Group, were kidnapped as they were clearing mines from countryside close to the Cambodian temple complex Angkor Wat, in March 1996.

Their remains were discovered after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge two years later, but it was only this year that five men charged with the crimes were arrested. They are: Khem Ngun, Puth Lim, Sin Dorn, Loch Mao and Cheap Chet.

Twenty other members of Mr Howes’s team were held, but were released after he agreed to remain with their captors as surety for a future ransom. But he and Mr Houn were shot dead within a week after being given a last meal of apples and the tropical fruit durian, according to Cambodian prosecutors.

A joint investigation by Cambodian and Scotland Yard detectives suggested ten years ago that Loch Mao was responsible for the killing. But yesterday the accused man insisted that his senior commander, Khem Tem, had ordered a soldier named Nget Rim to carry out the murder.

“Howes fell backward. It was one single shot,” Mr Loch said. “Khem Tem then ordered me to fire more shots. I walked up with the intention of firing a shot into his chest, but Khem Ngun [another of the defendants] yelled, ‘That’s enough, he is already dead’.”

Mr Khem, who subsequently defected from the Khmer Rouge and was a major-general in the Cambodian Army at the time of his arrest last November, said: “Another Khmer Rouge soldier close to Ta Mok [a senior commander] ordered the shooting of Howes in the head, and then I turned my face away and felt shock.”

The arrests of the accused men appear to have been delayed for political reasons: in the early days the victorious government did not want to do anything to discourage Khmer Rouge forces from surrendering.

Mr Nget was reportedly killed by a landmine in 2004 and Mr Khem died in a road accident in neighbouring Thailand.

Another of the accused men, Put Lim, said that Mr Howes was killed at night and his body was cremated on a wood fire.

Mr Howes, from Backwell in North Somerset, served seven years in the Royal Engineers before working for the Mines Advisory Group in northern Iraq and then Cambodia.

For two years after his abduction his fate was unknown and there were numerous rumours of his survival, that he was sick with malaria or forced to teach his captors how to manufacture mines.

In 1996, the Mines Advisory Group reportedly paid $120,000 to a man who claimed he could gain Mr Howes’s release, but the man then absconded with most of the money.

The Khmer Rouge

- Founded as a communist revolutionary group, in 1975 it toppled the US-backed government

- Led by Pol Pot, it developed a radical agrarian communism, closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing currency, outlawing religion and forcing people into countryside labour camps

- Anyone educated or deemed an intellectual was murdered

- The Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 2 million people

- In 1979 Vietnamese troops forced Pol Pot and his followers into the jungle

Source: Times Archive

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