Por Sen Chey district police are searching for a suspect who robbed and killed a woman in a rented room in Samraong Kraom commune in Phnom Penh at 6:30pm on Monday.

Deputy district police chief Chea Sovann told The Post on Tuesday that the victim, Auch Yen, 46, was a grocery seller who lived in a rented room with her sister, Auch Sarorn, who works at a garment factory in the capital.

Sovann said Sarorn returned from work on Monday to find the room they shared locked from the outside. She assumed her sister had gone out to buy stock for her store, as she normally did.

Sovann quoted Sarorn as saying: “After I saw the ice bucket which my sister stored drinks in was abnormally opened, I called her but no one answered. I then made a phone call to my cousin, who is the landlord’s son, to check and unlock the door.

“I then saw my sister dead in the room with a mess of stuff around her. A motorbike disappeared too.”

After speaking to the victim’s relative and inspecting the body, police concluded that the suspect intended to burgle the property said Sovann.

“At the scene, police found a pair of flip flops believed to belong to the offender. We checked the body and there was a black dot on the throat and the right jaw. We assume that the victim died because the offender hit and strangled her,” he said.

Police said they have scanned the footprints on the flip flops to identity the offender.