Crammed in a tiny cell smelling of urine and covered in slime with 146 other prisoners sleeping inches from each other.
These are the hellish conditions Australian filmmaker James Ricketson has endured since he was arrested as a spy in Cambodia nine months ago.
The 68-year-old is trapped in the notorious Prey Sar jail with no end in sight after his request for bail was denied by a Phnom Penh court.
Australian filmmaker James Ricketson endures hellish conditions in a Cambodian prison with 147 inmates locked in one tiny cell next to a disgusting bathroom
In the notorious Prey Sar jail he is crammed into a tiny cell smelling of urine and covered in slime with 146 other prisoners sleeping inches from each other
His 16-by-6 metre cell is so overcrowded he can only sleep in his tiny space on the floor, softened only by two towels and a thin blanket, from 6pm to 6.30am.
‘Men must sleep with their arms around each other like lovers, legs over torsos, heads within inches of each other,’ he wrote in a harrowing account for the Sydney Morning Herald.
The four-by-two metre bathroom is considerably worse, shared between all 147 men, crudely constructed and poorly maintained.
A trench serves as urinal and there are just three squat toilets that often have no water to flush them, with just thin, mouldy curtains that don’t stay up for privacy.
The disgusting bathroom doubles as the place to wash pots and pans and the floor is so slimy it’s dangerous to walk across.
‘It is not at all unusual to find, in horror, 10 men bathing themselves with ladles of water while others wash dishes or pee in the crude trench urinal, or use the squat toilet,’ he wrote.
Ricketson was arrested in June for flying a drone over an opposition political rally and accused of espionage, facing 10 year in jail
The award-winning documentary maker said the charges were trumped-up and accused the Australian Government of doing little to help him
As he sleeps only inches from the cell door and four metres from the filthy bathroom he is kept awake by the overpowering smell of urine.
Ricketson was arrested in June for flying a drone over an opposition political rally and accused of espionage, facing 10 years in jail for ‘collecting information prejudicial to national security’.
Prosecutors linked him to the now banned opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party amid a crackdown on dissent in the Southeast Asian country.
The award-winning documentary maker said the charges were trumped-up and accused the Australian Government of doing little to help him.
‘Without the media putting pressure on the government and helping to share public opinion I suspect that the (Australian) government would do nothing,’ he wrote.
The 68-year-old is trapped in the notorious Prey Sar jail with no end in sight after his request for bail was denied by a Phnom Penh court
This was despite Foreign Minister Julie Bishop making formal diplomatic representations to her Cambodian counterpart Prak Sokhonn on his behalf.
Ricketson said he had to abandon his plan to buy 18 houses for impoverished families $140,000 because of his legal expenses.
His son Jesse and his girlfriend Alex were also in ‘financial chaos’ from moving to Cambodia to help him, bring fresh fruit to the prison twice a week.
But Ricketson said the mostly poor 146 other men had it worse than him because they didn’t have Western friends to help them or media to highlight his case.
‘I am very lucky indeed,’ he concluded.