The ammunition was found at the school in the northeastern province of Kratie after demining teams were invited to check the compound for buried mines before building a new building, said Chheang Heng, deputy director of education in the province. More than 1,000 students attend Reina Kossamak School.
The site was an ammunition warehouse during the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s before it was converted to a school, and all ammunition was believed to have been removed from the site, Chheang Heng said.
The Mine Action Center team in Cambodia found 2,116 pieces of ammunition between Friday and Saturday, the head of the government agency, Heng Ratana, said on Facebook.
Among the items found were M79 grenades, FuzeM48 fuzes and shells for the B40 rocket launcher. Images shared on the organization’s Facebook page showed the objects covered in dirt, lined up in the schoolyard.
Many more shells were believed to remain, so the school would remain closed for a few days while the demining team removed the hazardous material, Heng Ratana said.
“I know this school compound was a large Khmer Rouge ammunition store in the late 1970s, but I couldn’t believe there was such a huge amount of ammunition buried under this shape,” Chheang Heng said.
“How many casualties would there have been if this munition had exploded?” he asked.
The brutal radical communist regime of the Khmer Rouge is believed to have killed an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians from starvation, disease and murder before falling to a Vietnamese invasion.
The nearly three decades of war, which ended in the late 1990s, left between 4 and 6 million landmines and other explosive munitions scattered across Cambodia. Most have withdrawn, but the explosives continue to kill people.
Since the end of the fighting, nearly 20,000 people have been killed and some 45,000 injured by wartime explosives, though the average annual death toll has dropped from several thousand to fewer than 100.
An anti-tank mine killed three members of a local demining team in early 2022 when they were working in the northern province of Preah Vihear.
The Cambodian government aims to eliminate all remaining landmines and munitions in the country by 2025.
FOUNTAIN: Associated Press
