A 64-year-old Swedish man, Johan Abrihim Escori, jailed since 2009 on child sex charges in Cambodia, died Sunday at the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital in Phnom Penh, a prison officially and a hospital administrator said yesterday, although they offered differing accounts of the prisoner’s death.
According to Srun leang, director of Prey Sar prison’s Correctional Center, Johan Abrihim Escori died at around 2:40 pm of an unknown disease that caused his bones to decompose.
“The prisoner died because his backbone decayed,” he said. However, Chhoeung Yav Yen, deputy director of the hospital, said Escori had suffered from “many diseases,” the most serious of which was urological in nature.
Escori was sentenced in Januray 2010 to six-and-a-half years in prison for having sex with a 9-year-old boy and later committing indecent acts against the same
child. At a 2009 hearing, Escori maintained that he had only touched the boy’s genitals in a “fatherly” fashion.
