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

By SOPHENG CHEANG
Associated Press

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — 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. A provincial official told The Associated Press by phone Monday that more than 1,000 students study at the school in Kratie, a northeastern province. Deminers found the ordnance in a search of the grounds before a new school building is constructed. The head of Cambodia’s demining agency says more than 2,100 pieces of different types of ordnance have been found since Friday and the searchers expect to find many more. The site had been an ammunition warehouse under the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, but the stock was thought to have been removed.