The body of an 8-year-old girl who went missing in Ho Chi Minh City in late January was found in a field in Cambodia’s Svay Rieng province, which borders Vietnam’s southwestern province of Tay Ninh, on Thursday, Vietnamese police reported on Friday. The body was identified as eight-year-old Ngo Ngoc Phut, a grade-2 student of Binh My 2 Primary School in Ho Chi Minh City’s Cu Chi District, said the district police on Friday. They said they had brought Phut’s body to the Binh Hung Hoa morgue in the city's Binh Tan District for an autopsy as part of the investigation into the cause of her death, police said. Earlier the same day, Colonel Nguyen Hoai Phuong, commander of the Tay Ninh Province Border Guard, confirmed that Cambodian police had handed the girl’s body to his force so that it could be sent back to the victim’s family in Cu Chi’s Binh My Commune.  Nguyen Huu Hanh, 30, Phut’s father, reported to police in the commune that Phut was missing on January 26, when the motorbike taxi driver who was hired by Hanh to pick Phut up from school every day wasn’t able to find her when her class ended.  Local police then launched an investigation and searched for the girl. Hanh said that nine years ago, he co-lived with Ngo Ngoc Dinh, a woman from the southern province of Binh Duong, and they later gave birth to Phut. When Phut reached five years old, the couple, who do not have a certificate of marriage, lived separately. Phut had since lived with her father while her mother went to Cambodia to work at a casino. Hanh occasionally took Phut to Cambodia to visit Dinh. On March 19, while Dinh was working at the Cambodian casino, she was told by an acquaintance that the body of a girl had been found in a field in Svay Rieng province and that the body was likely Phut’s. Dinh and her acquaintance then went to the scene and she confirmed that the body was of her daughter after examining the clothing on the body, along with her school bag and notebooks left at on the scene. The girl’s body was in an advanced state of decomposition when it was found. Cu Chi police are investigating the case.

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