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Opposition leader claims CPP-led government will threaten violence against election whistleblowers

HENG CHIVOAN

Sam Rainsy gestures at a pile of alleged evidence of voter fraud.

More than 100 people who supported the opposition's claims of election fraud stemming from last month's polls have been forced into hiding, opposition leader Sam Rainsy said Thursday.

He added that he feared the Cambodian People's Party would use violence against anyone making allegations of vote rigging against it.

"Witnesses are embarrassing for the CPP," he said, but vowed to push ahead with his campaign to discredit the results of the July 27 general election, which the opposition claims was riddled with irregularities.

"We have just started," Sam Rainsy said, a day after the Constitutional Council upheld the National Election Committee's dismissal of his party's final election complaint.

The SRP this week lodged its first legal complaints against CPP-aligned commune chiefs that it accuses of issuing fraudulent election forms to unregistered voters in a bid to stuff the ballot boxes for the ruling party.

One of the first submitted to the courts involved Suos Sarin, chief of Boeung Tumpun commune, who the SRP said gave one voter, Kong Kiet, documentation that allowed him to cast two ballots - once in his own name and the second time under the name Yov Pheth, a so-called "ghost voter".

"We have evidence that the same person was given [identity documents in] two different names and so voted twice with both votes going to the CPP," Sam Rainsy said.

"We have to prevent Kong Kiet from being killed, and so we have helped him go into hiding," he added.

Suos Sarin told the Post Thursday he had not heard that he was the subject of an SRP complaint.