Ex-Police Chief Gets 4 Years for Taking Bribes

Court observers say sentencing far too light for gravity of Crime

The Banteay Meanchey Provincial Court yesterday sentenced former provincial police chief Hun Hean to four years in prison after convicting him on three counts of corruption after years of taking bribes from suspected drug dealers and corrupt law enforcement officers. Human rights groups said the sentencing was far too light considering the gravity of the crime. Presiding Judge Im Vannak also ordered Mr Hean to pay the court $320,000 in fines, twice the amount he was found to have taken in bribes during his three years as police chief. The judge, however, knocked nearly a year off Mr Hean’s prison term for the time he had already spent in pretrial detention since January, according to deputy prosecutor Phan Phearom. “This conviction provides a good example of the judicial sector fighting corruption,” he said. Following a two-day trial earlier this month, Judge Vannak said Mr Hean had confessed to taking bribes from suspected drug dealers on two occasions in 2009 and 2010 and from economic crime police officers manning nine border checkpoints across Banteay Meanchey province. Phun Chin, a provincial monitor for human rights group Licadho, who attended the trial, said Mr Hean only confessed to taking bribes from the suspected drug dealers. He said Mr Hean claimed to have no idea where the wads of money his subordinates were giving him every month were coming from and put it down to a long-standing tradition in the wider civil service of sending money up the chain of command.