Man pays for petrol with nephew

Phnom Penh - A Cambodian who found he had forgotten his wallet after filling up his motorbike with petrol ended up paying for the three litres of petrol with his nephew.

The Kampuchea Thmey (New Cambodia) newspaper said on Monday the nine-year-old, who it named as Dy, had been on a trip with his uncle in March 2002 to try and track down his father in a nearby province in the war-scarred southeast Asian nation.

However, their motorbike ran out of petrol before reaching their destination and, after filling up with three litres of gasoline from a roadside stall, the uncle realised he had no money.

Eventually he convinced the old lady selling petrol to take his nephew as a guarantee he would return with the cash -- 87 pence, the paper said.

Nearly two years later, she is still waiting -- but has opted to keep the youngster.

"I have decided to take care of him and raise him as my own grandson," she told the paper.

Despite a huge U.N.-backed reconstruction effort in the early 1990s, child rights remain a distant dream in Cambodia where society still bears the scars of decades of civil war, including the Khmer Rogue genocide of the 1970s. -- Reuters

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