Unidentified gunman opens fire on protesting Cambodian workers

PHNOM PENH, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Three female Cambodian garment workers got wounded on Monday by bullets shot from an unidentified gunman while they were protesting for salary increase in front of their factories in Svay Rieng province bordering with Vietnam, said police.

"One young female worker was critically wounded on her chest and the other two girls were slightly wounded in the shooting," Keo Kong, police chief of Svay Rieng's Bavet city, told Xinhua by telephone after the incident.

He said while some 3,000 workers at the Kingmaker Footwear, Kaoway Sports and Sheico in the Manhattan Special Economic Zone ( SEZ) situated in Bavet city were protesting by burning tires and destroying the factories' properties, a gunman dressed in white shirt approached the workers by a car and opened fire on them.

"After the shooting, the man escaped into a nearby Acacia forest," he said. "We are investigating for the identity of the gunman."

The wounded workers had been sent to the provincial hospital soon after the incident, he said.

Chieng Am, Governor of Svay Rieng province, said that the workers at the three factories had conducted strikes for a couple of days in order to ask employers to raise salaries for them.

He denied some local media reporting that the police opened gunfire on the workers.

"Our police are deployed just to protect the factories' properties, not to shoot workers," he said.

He added that he had ordered the police to hunt the perpetrator for legal punishment.

One of the protesters, Tep Kunny, at the Kaoway Sports factory, said that she had heard that the seriously wounded worker had already died at the hospital.

Kunny said the factories in the Manhattan Special Economic Zone (SEZ) have no worker representative or union.

The garment industry is the country's largest income maker. The sector earned total revenues of 4.24 billion U.S. dollars last year, representing 87 percent of the country's total exports.

The whole industry consisted of more than 300 factories, employing more than 300,000 people, mostly women from rural areas.

Low wages and poor working conditions have led to frequent strikes in this Southeast Asian nation. The minimum monthly wage for a worker is 66 U.S. dollars.