CAMBODIA: And Now There Are Nine

CAMBODIA And Now There Are Nine

Like any good reporter, U.P.I. Correspondent Catherine M. Webb wanted to phone in the news. Emergingfrom the jungle along Cambodia’s embattled Highway 4, the pretty New Zealander and five companions flagged down a Cambodian military vehicle and rode to a town 25 miles southwest of Phnom-Penh. There, Kate Webb—missing for 24 days and widely presumed dead —rang up U.P.I.’s office in the capital and told her startled and relieved colleagues that she was “alive and well.”

On April 7, Kate, a Japanese cameraman, a Cambodian photographer and three Cambodian assistants vanished while covering some fierce fighting on Highway 4. Nine days later, Cambodian troops in the area found the bullet-torn and decomposing body of a Caucasian woman in a shallow grave; their discovery seemed to confirm fears that Kate had become the tenth journalist to die in Cambodia since the war spread there last spring (TIME, May 3).

Cornered the day after a Cambodian position they were visiting had been overrun, Webb and her companions were held by the Communists for three weeks in hideouts in the Elephant mountains southwest of Phnom-Penh. On the whole, she reported, the Communists “treated us well.” No one knows just why she was freed. No one may ever know the identity of the woman in the shallow grave. Following usual Cambodian army practice, the body was cremated on the spot.