Dutch national charged in child’s abuse and torture

>> PHNOM PENH: A Dutchman was charged by a Cambodian court on Friday over disturbing videos that appeared to show his boyfriend torturing a naked toddler with a stun gun.

The footage, which emerged earlier this week, shows the two-year-old screaming and crying as a man prods different parts of his body with the stun gun and later shoves an object down his throat.

A Vietnamese man, 34-year-old Nguyen Thanh Dung, was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday and confessed to abusing the boy in an interview published by state media.

He told investigators he was high on meth when he carried out the abuse in Cambodia in August.

On Friday his partner, Stefan Struik, a 53-year-old Dutch national who also holds Cambodian citizenship, was charged with failing to report the crime.

“The court charged and jailed him for failing to file a complaint about the mistreatment of the minor and for hiding leads,” said Meas Pros, a spokesman for the court in northeastern Mondulkiri province.

Mr Dung will be prosecuted in Vietnam, he added. According to James McCabe, who heads the Child Protection Unit and is assisting with the investigation, Mr Dung was asked to care for the two-year-old boy while his parents worked on Mr Struik’s farm in Cambodia.

The child is now safe and with his family in Phnom Penh, said Mr McCabe.

The video also became a source of outrage in nearby Myanmar this week after the UK’s Daily Mail cited false reports that it showed a soldier torturing a Muslim Rohingya child.