It had all the hallmarks of a cold-blooded, professional murder.
Next to a famous temple in Bangkok’s historic royal district, security camera footage shows a man parking his motorcycle, taking off his helmet so his face is clearly visible, and calmly walking across the road.
A few minutes later, shots are heard. Another man falls to the ground.
The killer quickly walks back to his motorcycle, appears to throw something, and leaves.
The victim was Lim Kimya, a 73-year-old former parliamentarian from Cambodia’s main opposition party, CNRP, which was banned in 2017. He was shot in the chest with two bullets, according to Thai police. He had just arrived in Bangkok with his wife by bus from Cambodia.
The officer tried to resuscitate him, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.
“He was brave, independent-minded,” Monovithya Kem, daughter of CNRP leader Kem Sokha, told the BBC.
“No one but the Cambodian state would want to kill him.”
Lim Kimya held dual Cambodian and French citizenship, but chose to remain in Cambodia even after his party was banned. The CNRP – the Cambodia National Rescue Party – was a merger of two former opposition parties, and in 2013 it came close to defeating the party of Hun Sen, the self-proclaimed “strongman” who has ruled Cambodia for nearly 40 years before handing over to his son Hun Manet in 2023.
After his close call in the 2013 election, Hun Sen accused the CNRP of treason, shut it down and subjected its members to legal and other forms of harassment. In 2023, Kem Sokha, who had already spent six years under house arrest, was sentenced to 27 years in prison.
High-level political assassinations, while not unknown, are relatively rare in Cambodia; In 2016, a popular critic of Hun Sen, Kem Ley, was killed in Phnom Penh, and in 2012, an environmental activist Chut Wutty was also killed.
Based on security camera footage, Thai police have already identified Lim Kimye’s killer as a former Thai navy officer who now works as a motorcycle taxi driver. Finding it shouldn’t be difficult.
Whether the murder will be fully investigated is another matter, however.
In recent years, dozens of activists fleeing repression in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand have been turned back after seeking refuge, or in some cases killed or disappeared. Human rights groups believe there is an unwritten agreement between the four neighboring countries that allows each other’s security forces to pursue dissidents across the border.
Last November, Thailand sent six Cambodian dissidents, along with a young child, back to Cambodia, where they were immediately imprisoned. The United Nations recognized all of them as refugees. Earlier this year, Thailand also sent a Vietnamese activist for the Montagnards back to Vietnam.
In the past, Thai anti-monarchy activists have been abducted and disappeared in Laos, widely believed to be by Thai security forces operating outside their own borders. In 2020, a young Thai activist who fled to Cambodia, Wanchalerm Satsaksit, was kidnapped and disappearedagain assumed by Thai operatives.
Cambodian authorities did little to investigate and announced last year that they had closed the case. It is possible that the same will now happen in the case of Lim Kimye.
“Thailand presided over a de facto ‘swap arrangement,'” says Phil Robertson, Thailand director of Asian Human Rights and Labor Advocates.
“Dissidents and refugees are being traded for political and economic favors with neighboring countries. The growing practice of transnational repression in the Mekong sub-region must be stopped immediately.”
When the US- and UK-educated Hun Manet succeeded his father as Cambodia’s prime minister, there was speculation about whether he might rule with a lighter hand. But opposition figures are still being prosecuted and imprisoned, and the little space left for political dissent is almost completely closed.
Since his semi-retirement, the figure of Hun Sen still hovers over his son’s administration; he is now calling for a new law that would make anyone who tries to replace him a terrorist.
Thailand, which lobbied hard for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council and won it this year, will now be under pressure to show it can bring to justice those behind such a brazen assassination on the streets of the capital.
