Today in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a Cambodian court sentenced Heang Hun, a former Khmer Rouge soldier, no relation to Attila, to 18-years in prison for murdering his friend during a drunken argument. After the argument he carved out his friends liver and ate it.
Hun had asked his friend Khin Khoeun over to his home for whisky and conversation.
I have no idea how well of a friend Khoeun was to Hun because apparently Khoeun didn't know that Hun couldn't hold his liquor all that well. Now according to Hun, a small disagreement with Khoeun lead him to pull out a gun and shoot Khoeun four times. Now that is Hun calling the argument between he and Khoeun small. Those are his own words.
After killing his friend over this small disagreement, he had some neighborhood children drag his friend's corpse downstairs where he used a sharp knife to remove his liver and then fried it up in his Wok.
He apparently ate the liver with wine and had a peaceful sleep. Police apprehended Heang Hun in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anglong Veng, after he disappeared from the scene of the crime.
He was sentenced to 18 years in prison and fined $526 to pay the family in the stiffest fine ever handed down by the provincial court. Here is a side note on the Khmer Rouge in case you missed the 1984 film "The Killing Fields" about an American newspaper correspondent, who persuadeds his Cambodian assistant, friend and interpreter, to remain behind with him to help cover the story after the communist Khmer Rouge takeover and withdrawal of US military forces. The film chronicles unforgettable scenes of suffering endured during the Cambodian bloodbath known as "Year Zero". Another Example of Asian Drama In April of 1975 the Khmer Rouge subsequently established the state of Democratic Kampuchea, in Cambodia and instituted what was arguably the most radical experiment in social engineering of the twentieth century. In an effort to "purify" the "Khmer race" and create an absolutely classless utopian society, the Khmer Rouge began by emptying all Cambodian urban centers of their population, abolishing banking, finance and currency, outlawing all religions, reorganizing traditional kinship systems into a communal order, and eliminating private property so completely that even personal hygiene supplies were communal.
Extreme levels of coercion were required in order to effect this total transformation of Cambodia's conservative, agrarian Buddhist peasant society. The cost in human life was high. Of the total Cambodian population of some 7 to 8 million in 1975, various estimates put the death toll over the following three years and eight months at 15% to 40% of the total. The official tally published by the successor regime to the Khmer Rouge sets the number of dead at 3.1 million. Several demographic analyses (by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Bureau of the Census, and the U.N. Population Bureau) have estimated the death toll to be between 1 million and 2 million. Empirical analyses by Western scholars of Cambodia place the estimate at between 1.5 and 1.8 million dead from execution, disease, starvation and overwork.
Today in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a Cambodian court sentenced Heang Hun, a former Khmer Rouge soldier, no relation to Attila, to 18-years in prison for murdering his friend during a drunken argument. After the argument he carved out his friends liver and ate it.
