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. 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.
They 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.Article content “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.The brutal rule of the radical communist Khmer Rouge was blamed for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodian from starvation, illness and killing before being ousted by a Vietnamese invasion.