A former Khmer Rouge faction in Cambodia's Pailin province fought yesterday with troops loyal to Mr Hun Sen as the Cambodian leader's forces threatened the last stronghold of royalist resistance to the north.
Thai television said Cambodian villagers had fled into the Bo Rai district of Thailand's south-east Trat province as 500 fighters belonging to a Khmer Rouge faction which defected from the rebel group last year tried to take back territory from Mr Hun Sen, Cambodia's Second Prime Minister.
The faction was formally integrated into government forces, but clashes have apparently spread in the north-west of the country following a move by Mr Hun Sen to oust the First Prime Minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, early last month.
Clandestine radio broadcasts by the last hardline Khmer Rouge leaders have said defectors and hardliners have joined forces with royalists to oppose Mr Hun Sen's "coup d'etat".
Khmer Rouge soldiers presumed to be from the hardline faction were assisting royalists in their last bastion of military resistance to Mr Hun Sen in O Smach, some 200 km north of Pailin.
Senior military officials in Phnom Penh claimed Mr Hun Sen's men had overrun O Smach at 1:15 p.m. (7.15 a.m. Irish time), but witnesses said it was still in royalists' hands at 4 p.m.
Some 20,000 to 35,000 Cambodians have been granted temporary refuge in Thailand's Surin province, opposite O Smach, in a massive 24-hour exodus that has produced widely varying estimates of their number.
The television reports provided no details about refugees gathered in Trat province, some 280 km south-east of Bangkok, but the fighting was reportedly in areas with only scattered villages.