Horrific accident puts Cambodia’s poor travel conditions for garment workers in spotlight
- Five female garment factory workers had their arms severed clean off as they were commuting to work in an overloaded open-back truck
- Up to 70 women can be packed in like cattle on a single truck, with drivers, often young and undertrained, under pressure to carry as many people as possible
Lang Srey Sar, 19, looks at the place where her arm was just a matter of weeks ago. The Cambodian factory worker lost the limb in a gruesome road accident. “Missing an arm … I look like a bird without a wing,” she says, sadly.
Srey Sar was one of about 40 garment workers on their way to their factories in an open-back truck on April 4 when it collided with a cement mixer truck that their driver was trying to overtake. Eighteen of the women were injured and five, who were holding on to the top of a metal frame, each lost an arm.
Roeun Kunthear, 31, was another of them. “I saw my arm cut off at the shoulder. Only when I saw it falling into my sleeve did I realise what was happening,” she says, talking to the South China Morning Post in her village in Kampong Speu province, about 50km (31 miles) from Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital.
According to the workers, whose arms were severed clean off, an ambulance arrived at the scene 30 minutes later. Their injuries were so serious, however, that the local hospital was not equipped to handle the surgery required for their injuries, so they were taken to another hospital two hours away.