PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA (AP) – Nineteen Japanese men detained in Cambodia in January on suspicion of participating in phone and online scams were deported to their homeland yesterday, police said.
The group boarded a chartered flight organised by the Japanese government at Phnom Penh International Airport, Cambodian National Police spokesperson General Chhay Kim Khouen said. Immigration Police, part of the Interior Ministry, said in a statement that the men were deported because they violated immigration law by living and working in Cambodia illegally. They will not be allowed to re-enter the country for three years, it said.
Tokyo police obtained arrest warrants for the 19 Japanese on suspicion of running phone scams from Cambodia targetting people in Japan, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported on Friday.
NHK said Cambodian authorities searched the men’s hotel rooms and “discovered a list of Japanese citizens believed to be targets in a fraud scheme”.
The 19 were taken into custody in the southern city of Sihanoukville on January 24 and sent to the capital, Phnom Penh, where they were held after being investigated by the Interior Ministry.
A Cambodian official at Phnom Penh International Airport who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media said the men were taking a chartered Malaysia Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur, where they would transfer to a waiting
Japanese plane.
He said a group of Japanese policemen came from Japan to escort the 19 men home.
At Phnom Penh’s airport, several vehicles a convoy with heavy protection from Cambodian and Japanese policemen drove rapidly directly to the waiting plane on the tarmac.
Police in Sihanoukville, which in the past few years has become notorious for crime such as online and phone scams, said in January that they opened the case after being informed on a crime-fighting hotline that about 20 Japanese men were being held there and extorted for money.
