Nara Pech was born and raised in Edmonton to a family of Cambodian origin, studied at York University in Toronto and was engaged to a partner of thirteen years in Ontario. In January 2015, at 28, he set off with two friends on a trip through Southeast Asia that was partly a holiday and partly, his sister later said, a way of connecting with his roots. It ended eight days later on the floor of an airport in Laos, and what happened in the last hours has never been explained.
What happened
The three friends flew into Bangkok on January 14, crossed into Cambodia the next day, visited Angkor Wat and went on to Phnom Penh. Early on January 21 they boarded a bus for Vietnam but got off after ten minutes because Nara believed other passengers were planning to rob them. They flew instead to Laos, landing at Wattay International Airport in Vientiane between 9 and 10 that night. There Nara decided to go home to Canada early. His friends stayed on.
Over the next hours he left a series of voicemails for his family. In them he says he is at the Vientiane airport, that he has apparently said something bad about Hun Sen, the Cambodian prime minister, and that the taxi drivers, the security guards and everyone around him are trying to get him to leave the building so they can kill him. He asks his father to call the embassy. His death certificate gives a time of death of 3 am on January 22. Lao police told Canadian officials that he had been detained at the airport and had killed himself with three self-inflicted wounds from broken glass, reportedly from a vending machine; they also recorded four knives at the scene.
The investigation
Canada has no embassy in Laos, so Australian consular staff identified the body and a Canadian officer from Bangkok visited the scene, the morgue and the police two days later. At the family’s request a full autopsy was carried out at Ramathibodi Hospital in Bangkok on February 2 rather than in Laos. It found that Nara had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and neck, including the external jugular vein, and in the back and forearm, and that there were cuts to his left hand and arm of the kind made while warding off a blade. The body was flown home on February 8 and the funeral held eight days later.
His sister, Sarena Armsworthy, spent the rest of the year trying to get someone to investigate. The RCMP told her in March that it had not opened a file; Foreign Affairs asked the force to become involved in April, and again in October, without result. A petition launched by the family and his fiancée asked Ottawa to intervene. In August, Australian officials confirmed that airport surveillance footage existed but that Laos would not hand over the full recording; Canadian requests for it in September and October went unanswered. Global News aired its first report on May 30, 2015, and its program 16×9 put the autopsy photographs and scene pictures in front of two Canadian specialists. The bloodstain analyst Joe Slemko concluded the injuries were not self-inflicted; the forensic pathologist Dr. John Butt concluded Nara had been murdered. The documentary, Who Killed Nara Pech?, was broadcast on November 7, 2015.
The explanations
The official account is suicide during a mental-health crisis, and the voicemails do show a frightened man convinced of a plot that had begun on a bus in Cambodia the previous morning. Against that stand the number and position of the wounds, the defensive cuts, the four knives, the fact that he was in some form of detention when he died and the refusal to release the video. The family believe he was killed by people at the airport and that the suicide finding protected them. No motive has been shown for anyone at Wattay to murder a transit passenger, and no evidence has been produced that his remarks about Hun Sen reached anyone who cared. Both readings leave questions the available record cannot answer.
Where it stands
Laos has not reopened the case, Canada has no jurisdiction to investigate a death abroad, and the RCMP never did. The footage remains in Vientiane. The family have the autopsy, the experts’ opinions and the voicemails, and nothing that can be taken to a court. Nara Pech’s death is classified as suicide in the only jurisdiction that counts, and as something else by almost everyone who has examined it.