Facebook post insulting King lands man in court

POLICE sent a man to the Kampot Provincial Court on December 16 after he was arrested the previous day for allegedly writing Facebook posts insulting King Norodom Sihamoni, Prime Minister Hun Sen and several provincial police chiefs.

The man was identified as a 25-year-old resident of Kep commune in neighbouring Kep province.

Kep provincial deputy police chief Poung Sokheng said the suspect was sent to the Kampot Provincial Court after questioning.

Sokheng said the legal basis for the man’s referral to court were his confessions to writing the insulting Facebook posts.

“We sent the case to court in connection with two offences. The first is incitement to discriminate and the other is public defamation on social media,” he said.

During questioning, the suspect said he wrote the Facebook post as a revenge on his girlfriend who had left him for another man. He said the break-up led him to create a new Facebook profile using the names of his ex-girlfriend’s parents, along with their photos, where he wrote the posts insulting the King and others.

Sokheng added that the accused had also written rude words about the provincial police chiefs of Kandal, Kep and Kampot.

The man, Sokheng said, wanted to frame his ex-girlfriend’s parents for the offenses and get them in trouble as revenge.

He said provincial police had cooperated with specialists from the Anti-Cybercrime Department under the Ministry of the Interior to identify the suspect over the past year.

As part of the investigation, they had called in the exgirlfriend and her parents for questioning multiple times.

Sokheng said the suspect, who initially denied that the Facebook account belonged to him, had first created a fake Facebook profile to author the insulting posts back in 2017. Early on, the suspect’s posts were not offensive enough to attract the attention of the authorities but they had gotten progressively worse over the past six months.

Anti-Cybercrime department director Chea Pov told The Post on December 16 that prior to his detention, the suspect had already written criticisms and insults about police officials on his own Facebook account.

“He had used rude words insulting senior officials of the National Police,” he said.

The suspect was arrested in Kep after his identity was confirmed and an official complaint filed against him.