Revisiting Haing Ngor's murder: 'Killing Fields' theory won't die

[azurnoir]

On a rainy night nearly 14 years ago, Haing Ngor parked his gold Mercedes in a graffiti-lined alleyway behind his apartment on the edge of Chinatown.

The Cambodian refugee-turned-actor had won an Academy Award for his role in 1984's "The Killing Fields," but he still lived in a tiny apartment where he kept his Oscar next to a large Buddha statue.

As he stepped out of his car, gunshots echoed off the alley walls. A neighbor rushed outside to find Ngor slumped on the pavement of his carport. He was dead.

In the Cambodian community, there was immediate speculation that Pol Pot or a member of the Khmer Rouge had ordered a hit on Ngor, an outspoken critic of the dictator. The Los Angeles Police Department launched an international investigation, only to conclude that Ngor was killed by three members of an Asian American gang, part of a random street robbery gone wrong. Two years later, the suspects were convicted and the case appeared to be closed.

The renewed debate was sparked by the testimony of a former Khmer Rouge prison chief at a major United Nations-backed tribunal in Phnom Penh aimed at assessing the crimes committed by Pol Pot and his supporters.

"Haing Ngor was killed because he appeared in the film 'The Killing Fields,' " Kang Kek Ieu, known as Comrade Duch, told the court last year.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ngor-murder21-2010jan21,0,3649366.story

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FWIW I have heard more than once From Cambodian or more properly Khmer friends that some of the gangs here had connections to the Khmer Rouge or in some cases were ex Khmer Rouge