CAMBODIA'S "jungle woman", whose case gripped the country after she apparently spent 18 years living in a forest, has been hospitalised after refusing food, her father and a doctor said yesterday.

Ms Rochom P'ngieng, now 28, went missing in 1989 while herding water buffalo in Ratanakkiri province around 600km northeast of the capital Phnom Penh.

But in early 2007, she was caught trying to steal food from a farmer.

Naked and dirty, she was hunched over like a monkey, scavenging the ground for pieces of dried rice in the forest.

She could not utter a word of any intelligible language. Instead, she made ?animal noises?, according to Mr Sal Lou, the man who says is her father.

Cambodians described her as "jungle woman" and "half-animal girl".

Mr Sal Lou told AFP yesterday that Rochom P'ngieng was admitted to the provincial hospital on Monday and had not adjusted to village life.

"She has refused to eat rice for about one month. She is skinny now... She still cannot speak. She acts totally like a monkey. Last night, she took off her clothes, and went to hide in the bathroom," Mr Sal Lou said.

"Her condition looks worse than the time we brought her from the jungle.
"She always wants to take off her clothes and crawl back to the jungle," he added.

Illness

Doctor Hing Phan Sokunthea, director of Ratanakkiri provincial hospital, said the woman was "in a state of nerves".

"Doctors have injected her with medicine twice a day to treat nervous illness, but she still cannot control herself," he said.

Mr Sal Lou said his family found it difficult to house the woman. He is now appealing to charities to take over her care.

The jungles of Ratanakkiri - some of the most isolated and wild in Cambodia - are known to have held hidden groups of hill tribes in the recent past.

In November 2004, 34 people from four hill tribe families emerged from the dense forest where they had fled in 1979 after the fall of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which they supported.

This article was first published in The New Paper.