Four Khmer Rouge families have emerged from remote Cambodian jungles 25 years after fleeing the Vietnamese invasion that toppled the Pol Pot regime.
The group - which expanded from 12 to 34 during their years in the northeastern jungles - had avoided any human contact in the belief they would be killed if Vietnamese troops found them.
"When they saw a human footprint, they moved further into the jungle," the police chief of Ratanakiri province said.
Vietnamese troops, which invaded Cambodia in December 1979, left in September 1989, when there were still remnants of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge battling the Hanoi-installed government in Phnom Penh.
The four Khmer Rouge families had lived off the land and replaced tattered rags with clothing made from bark and leaves in jungles teeming with poisonous snakes, leeches and malaria, officials said.
"They even took the rice from the crop of doves for seeds so they could survive," a human right activist, who interviewed the group, said.
As they moved, they crossed the border into Laos and eventually came across people in remote areas from whom they stole food, police said.
The Lao called the police, who arrived in a truck and made a search but found nothing. The Khmer saw the tracks of the truck, however, and decided to emerge from the jungles.
The group - the youngest of whom is five months old - is being looked after by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.