The capital’s Sen Sok district police will send a woman to Phnom Penh Municipal Court on Monday for plotting her husband’s murder. The man was shot dead last week.

The 26-year-old woman was arrested on Thursday, and police said she had hatched a plot with her lover to kill her husband, a 33-year-old high school teacher. Police are on the hunt for the gunman after the shooting last Tuesday night.

Sen Sok district police chief Hour Mengvang said on Sunday that the suspect and her husband had lived in Khmuonh commune with a five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter.

“The woman is suspected of being involved in the murder of her husband. Another suspect, a man, is being hunted down,” Mengvang said.

Mengvang said the woman had told police during questioning that she and her husband had not been getting along and she intended to leave him. She also admitted to having an affair with another man.

Mengvang said suspicion fell on the woman after she repeatedly gave differing accounts during questioning.

She later confessed to plotting the murder of her husband with her lover on August 25.

They carried out the plan two days later.

Last Tuesday, the woman called her lover to tell him that her husband was attending a ceremony in Kandal province and had promised to return very soon.

She told the gunman to wait in an isolated area on the husband’s route home. Just after 11pm on Tuesday night, the victim passed by alone on his motorbike and was shot dead, Mengvang said, with the gunman fleeing the murder scene.

A post-mortem showed the victim had been shot twice in the abdomen, Mengvang said.

The woman had screamed for help and cried loudly on hearing her husband had been killed, he added.

The National Police website quoted Mengvang as saying that the woman’s lover had argued with the victim while they were drinking together on August 25.

He then called the woman to hatch a plan to kill the man.