Chhay Visoth has placed signs at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum’s main entrance to prevent visitors from playing the game, which launched in Cambodia last weekend and involves hunting for virtual creatures using a smartphone, and has told his staff to watch out for anyone playing it.
He described the museum, a former torture hall of the Khmer Rouge, as a memorial to Cambodia’s suffering and since the signs had been put in place there had been no reports of gamers playing it, MailOnline reports.
An estimated 17,000 people were tortured and later killed at the centre by the regime between 1975 and 1979.
It is believed approximately 1.7 million Cambodians were executed or died of starvation or inadequate medical care during the rule of the hard-line communist group.
Head of the documentation centre of Cambodia, which collects Khmer Rouge artefacts, Youk Chhang said: “Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is not a shopping mall or a playground to catch Pokémon. Pokémon is a game. It must be banned and deleted immediately.”
The game has previously garnered negative publicity after reports of it being played at the former concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland, Arlington National Cemetery and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States, and Japan’s Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.
