On or about this date in 1974, French journalist Marc Filloux was killed in Khmer Rouge captivity along with his Laotian translator and girlfriend Manivanh.
The Agence France-Presse Southeast Asia correspondent, Filloux (English Wikipedia entry | this is where it’ll be when French Wikipedia adds it) was a sort of retirony case in that he’d been hired back to the Paris bureau.
Before resuming native soil, Filloux took a trip to Cambodia seeking interviews with the leadership of the Khmer Rouge — at this point still a Maoist guerrilla insurgency, although a growing one that now stood within a year of seizing power.
A Khmer Rouge patrol seized Filloux and Manivanh almost immediately upon their entry into Cambodia, apparently taking them as spies. They would never emerge from custody.
Italian correspondent Tiziano Terzani reported hearing rumors that the Khmer Rouge had executed them as spies, but specifics on their fate have never been confirmed.
Cambodia in 2013 unveiled a monument in Phnom Penh to the journalists killed and disappeared during the Cambodian Civil War. Both Marc Filloux and Manivanh are on it.
On this day..
- 1683: John Nisbet the Younger
- 2004: Fabrizio Quattrocchi, "I'll show you how an Italian dies!"
- 2015: Siti Zainab
- 1725: Maria Romberg, her lover, her maid, and her witch
- 1322: Bartholomew de Badlesmere
- 1922: George Hornsby
- 1950: Eugene LaMoore, the last hanged in Alaska
- Themed Set: Alaska
- 1736: Andrew Wilson, in the Heart of Midlothian
- 1647: Domenica Gratiadei and her coven of witches
- 1965: Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, In Cold Blood subjects
- 1865: Not George S.E. Vaughn
- 1682: Avvakum Petrov, Old Believer