The father of a 20-year-old girl who was allegedly driving a Range Rover when it hit and killed an Irish national early on Sunday morning arrived at the Phnom Penh Municipal Traffic Police office yesterday to tell the authorities that he could not locate his daughter.

Chev Hak, director of the city’s traffic police, said yesterday that the victim was Tomas Edmond Beecher, 30. Beecher was killed while taking his bicycle across the street around 1:30am on Sunday at the intersection of Monivong Boulevard and Street 278 in Boeung Keng Kang 1 commune.

The driver subsequently fled the scene and the car was seized. According to reports, several people in the vehicle also emptied out of it and ran away. Beecher’s body was initially sent to Stung Meanchey pagoda.

“Right now, we are organising the report of an accident with the details of the Irishman to the UK Embassy in Cambodia to help and find his family or relatives to bring his body back to his county,” Hak said.

He said the father of the driver was a tourist police officer and that yesterday he “came to our office to resolve the problem and asked us to help him to find his daughter, because until now she has not come back home”.

When asked for the identity of the driver and the tourist police officer, Hak demurred.

“I am sorry that now I am not in the office; I am busy driving on the road. However, we are resolving it with care,” he said.

Fearing mob violence and lacking proper driving documents, motorists flee crash sites frequently.

Of all the crashes recorded by the government from 2006 to 2012, an average of 27 per cent involved hit-and-runs, and of all the fatalities from those crashes, hit-and-runs occurred in 43 per cent of cases.