Minister of Culture and Fine Arts HIM Chhem of Cambodia

Him Chhem is a Cambodian politician.

Him Chhem expresses his government's thanks to Ambassador Mussomeli.

But Chhem is now walking free of the alleged crimes.

We cannot definitively state what role, if any, Scotty Chhem had in Ricky Soks murder because we have been relying on the word of a witness who is now adamantly recanting, Lynch said in a statement yesterday.

Chhem was arraigned on three charges in Superior Court in July 2003, just two weeks after his father, Savorth Sim, 36, was gunned down as he walked home from a downtown nightclub.

Rubio told the police and the attorney generals office that Chhem had kept a stolen rifle hidden in his bedroom, that they met in the bedroom and that Chhem gave him the rifle and the bullets knowing that he intended to shoot Sok.

Initially imprisoned at the Rhode Island Training School for Youth and then the ACI while awaiting trial, Chhem has been on home confinement virtually the entire time since May 2003, living in Providence with his mother, Heang Chhem, and four brothers.

At the attorney generals request, Chhem was waived out of Family Court on Dec 11, 2002, over the objection of Chhems lawyer at the time, in order to be prosecuted as an adult.

According to Healey, Rodgers ruled that Chhem was not fully aware of the rights he had given up in the plea bargain.

The attorney general then reinstated the original charges on which Chhem had been indicted: First-degree murder, conspiracy and using a firearm in the commission of a crime of violence.

Heang Chhem says she knew that she and Savorth Sim were going to have a family together from the moment they met as teenagers in 1982, in Thailand.

Jimmy Chhem was 16 when he and his 17-year-old brother took an arsenal of guns, scopes and bullet-resistant vests to a fight between two groups of teens at Abess Road Elementary School in December 2003.

In 1982, Navin Chhem fled the killing fields of Cambodia to provide a future for the family he hoped one day to have.

I don't want them to walk free on what they did," Chhem said of his boys, Jimmy and Sydney.

Jimmy Chhem had his Glock with a laser scope, while Sydney Chhem had an AK-47.

It was then that Jimmy Chhem took aim and shot him, Dixon said.

Chhem is the oldest of five boys born to a Cambodian woman who, when she was 17, escaped the violence of Pol Pot’s regime.

But Chhem was free, if hesitant, to talk about his six months in the ACI.

In "seg," Chhem was alone in his cell for 23 hour a day, with no radio or TV.