Deadly shortcut in Kampong Speu: Trails and rules don’t always protect loggers from their profession’s perils

On Tuesday February 7, Run Ret shifted his homemade tractor into gear and crossed onto HLH Agriculture’s sprawling cassava plantation in Kampong Speu province, the start of a well-trodden loggers’ route into the eastern Cardamom Mountains.

On Thursday night, three days later, his tractor made the return journey and left the company’s land, his corpse, pierced by three bullets, piled on top of six pieces of second-grade wood.

The 27-year-old, a charcoal splitter, construction worker and father of one, was new to timber felling, but he was not dreaming of getting a slice of the multimillion-dollar stream of profits from illegal logging that flow out of the Kingdom’s rapidly disappearing forests.

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