The account given in September names organs, victims and a motive. The grounds given for it are the ones given in May, and they are the contents of one building.
English readers met the O Smach organ allegation on the morning of 8 September 2026, in The Nation, which drew on the account NationTV had carried from a press visit the day before. An operating theatre inside the compound hospital had raised suspicions, the report said. It might have been used to remove organs, kidneys or hearts, from scam workers who missed their targets and had been beaten or tortured until close to death. The same passage has the organs sold on for money. The report attributed the suspicion to the Royal Thai Police.
O Smach is a district in Oddar Meanchey province, in northern Cambodia. Thai troops took the compound inside it during the border fighting of December 2025 and have held it since. A large online scam operation ran there for years, and the United States Treasury recorded beatings, confiscated passports and ransom demands at the site in 2024.
The Joint Information Centre, the Thai body that runs information on the border situation, arranged the visit. Its director, an air chief marshal, led the party through the compound. With him were ASEAN observers and Thai and foreign journalists.
Matichon, which belongs to a different company, ran the same passage the same day and in nearly the same words. Same order of clauses, same two organs, same closing line calling the act extremely cruel. Both name their source inside the sentence, and it is the Office of the National Police. The two reports are not two accounts. They are one, printed twice.
The Thai text says only that the room may have been used this way, in one building, at some point before the site changed hands. Which workers, when, how many, at whose hands: no version of the passage says. The people it is about are workers at the compound, living or dead.
None of this began in September. Thailand and the United States government held talks on trafficking from 21 to 25 April. On 8 May the Deputy Commissioner-General of the Royal Thai Police, who directs the force’s Anti-Human Trafficking Centre, set out what Thailand had presented at them on O Smach. The material, he said, included a detention room, places of forced labour and torture, an operating room, an X-ray machine and obstetric equipment. Both Thailand and the United States suspected a link to a human organ trading network, he said, and it was under investigation. Which American department, bureau or embassy held that suspicion, he did not say.
Three weeks later, at police headquarters in Bangkok, a reporter asked him about the building that looked like a hospital. They were investigating, he answered, whether it connected to human trafficking or to organ trading. Inside was a great deal of medical kit: surgical equipment, an X-ray machine, obstetric equipment. He called that abnormal, because a scam gang should not need a medical facility of that size. They had to check, he said, whether the building hid organ trading or other offences.
An investigation is open. The police have said so publicly, and they have given their reasons for it.
Those are the grounds given in May, and they are the grounds still on offer in September. What arrived in between was detail: two named organs, a class of victims, an account of what had happened to them first, and a use for the organs.
In both Thai reports of the visit, the sentence immediately before the organ passage describes the building. A newly built hospital stands there, Zhong Nan Hospital, the compound’s only one, and it was there, the briefing said, to treat Chinese nationals holding senior positions in the operation. Matichon carries that as a belief rather than a finding.
A well equipped clinic for the people running a site of that size would hold much of what the police found. So would the thing the police suspect. The record does not separate them.
The United States had put its own account of this site on the record two years before those April talks. On 12 September 2024 the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers American sanctions, designated the Cambodian senator Ly Yong Phat, his L.Y.P. Group and O-Smach Resort. The order it used, Executive Order 13818, covers serious human rights abuse.
Under its own heading, the release sets out what victims reported. False job offers drew them in, their phones and passports went on arrival, and they were put to work on scams. Those who called for help described beatings, electric shocks, ransom demands, or threats of sale to other gangs. It records two reports of people jumping to their deaths from buildings at the resort. The release goes through the site at length and never reaches a clinic. It predates the Thai entry by fifteen months, and describes a different moment.
The side that made the allegation is the side that holds the ground, decides who goes in, and arranged the visit of 7 September. The reporters and the observers saw what that side put in front of them. The observer team came from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, and the centre’s director said its role was observation and nothing else.
Buildings damaged in the December fighting are falling apart. Water stands in some of them. Fittings are breaking up and food has gone mouldy.
Cambodia had spoken before any of that began. The Minister of Information posted on the afternoon of 7 September, hours ahead of the delegation and a day before the organ passage reached English. Before journalists examine buildings, documents or equipment said to be tied to online scams, he said, they should establish first whose territory those places sit in. They should also establish when and how Thai forces came to control the ground. Suspicion of crime in one state’s territory does not give another state’s forces the right to enter, occupy or exercise authority there on their own.
He recalled Cambodia’s protests at the entry of foreign military attachés, law enforcement officials and journalists without Cambodian consent, and said that refusing a foreign military presence is not the same as protecting online scams. It is an answer about the visit. It is not an answer about the room, and it could not have been. Nobody had put the organ passage yet.
On 8 September the Thai hold on the compound reached nine months. On the account of the side holding it, nothing has been carried out of the site in that time.