Thousands of pieces of unexploded ordnance found buried in ground at Cambodian school

PHNOM PENH: Cambodian authorities have temporarily closed a high school where thousands of pieces of unexploded ordnance from the country's nearly three decades of civil war have been unearthed.

The ordnance was found at the school in the northeastern province of Kratie after deminers were invited to search for buried landmines on the campus before a new building was constructed, Chheang Heng, the provincial deputy chief for education.

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More than 1,000 students study at Queen Kossamak high school. The site was an ammunition warehouse during the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s before being turned into a school and all of the ordnance was thought to have been removed, Chheang Heng said. From Friday through Sunday, 2,116 pieces of ordnance were collected by deminers from the Cambodian Mine Action Center, the government agency's director general, Heng Ratana, posted on Facebook

These included M79 grenades, FuzeM48 shells and ordnance for the B40 rocket launcher. Photos posted on its Facebook page showed the dirt-covered items placed in a row on the school's ground. Heng Ratana said many more pieces of ordnance are believed to still be buried, so the school will be closed for some days while the deminers work to collect the dangerous material. “I know that this school site used to be a big ammunition warehouse of the Khmer Rouge in late 1970s, but I could not believe that there was a huge amount of ammunition buried underground like this,” Chheang Heng said.