By Associated Press
The president of the anti-communist Cambodian Freedom Fighters says he will use force to free former Oregon resident Richard Kiri Kim from jail.
Kim, whose wife and two sons are still in the Portland area, and four other men were sentenced to life in prison last month for their role in a deadly terrorist attack meant to overthrow Cambodia’s government.
Two of the men were tried in absentia, including Yasith Chhun, 43, the Freedom Fighter president who refuses to travel to Cambodia to accept his sentence.
Chhun, who works as a tax accountant in Long Beach, said he plans to spring Kim through a plan to overthrow the government by military force later this year.
“This time we’re going to be everywhere, across the whole country,” Chhun told The Oregonian newspaper. “We’re going to make the enemy lose control so they cannot focus on anything.”
The suspects were convicted of attempting to overthrow Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government with an armed attack on three government buildings in Phnom Penh on Nov. 24.
Six attackers and one civilian were killed, and 12 wounded in the pre-dawn raids.
Kim, 51, was accused of being one of the key planners of the violence and of recruiting poor farmers into the Cambodian Freedom Fighters, which he often portrayed as a development aid organization that helped rebuild Cambodia after 25 years of civil strife.
The Cambodian Freedom Fighters accused Hun Sen of being dictatorial. Hun Sen belonged to the ultra-left Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, and later headed a single-party Communist state backed by Vietnam.
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