Reach Sambath

Reach Sambath (Khmer: រាជ សម្បតិ្ត) (17 July 1964 – 11 May 2011) was a Cambodian journalist and a former spokesperson and "Chief of Public Affairs" of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), commonly known as the "Khmer Rouge Tribunal", set up to try the most senior Khmer Rouge leaders from 1975-1979. Sambath had a master's degree in Journalism from Columbia University, New York, and a career as a university lecturer at the Royal University of Phnom Penh and a reporter in Cambodia with Agence France-Presse since the 1990s.

Biography

Early life

Sambath was born in Svay Rieng, Cambodia. His father was a district governor there. In 1975, at the age of 10, he lost his father and later lost his mother and three of his four brothers to the Khmer Rouge's Killing Fields. For years, he searched for any scrap of memory of his lost family, eventually retrieving an old picture of his father from a family friend taken when he was a monk for a short-time in a Buddhist pagoda. After the Khmer Rouge period, he eked out a living as a roadside ice seller and a bike taxi-driver from 1981 to 1984 to support his studies.