Cambodian Man Gets 13 Years for Murder of Jewish Mother and Daughter

Daphna Beerdsen

By JTA December 29, 2014

A Cambodian man who confessed to killing a Dutch Jewish United Nations worker and her daughter in Phnom Penh was sentenced to 13 years in jail.

Chea Phin, 35, confessed to killing Daphna Beerdsen, 31, and Dana Beerdsen, 2, in April in their home in the Cambodian capital by stabbing them after the mother noticed he had broken onto her property and called for help while using a broomstick to fend him off.

“My goal was to steal her bicycle. I did not go (to her house) with the intention to kill them,” Phin said earlier in the month during his trial, before his sentencing on Dec. 24, according to the French news agency AFP.

Phin, who was homeless, was convicted of murder following his arrest at a Buddhist pagoda two days after the stabbings, according to Cambodia Daily. The victims’ bodies were buried at a Jewish cemetery in Amsterdam.

Beerdsen and her husband, Joris Oele, were both U.N. workers living in Cambodia.

Beerdsen had been an active member of the city’s Jewish community of 100.

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