Khmer Rouge prison chief Comrade Duch dies
Comrade Duch, a former senior figure of the Khmer Rouge convicted of crimes against humanity in Cambodia, has died. He was serving a life term after being sentenced by a UN-backed court.
Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, ran the notorious Tuol Sleng prison where thousands of individuals were tortured and murdered in the late 1970s. As much as two million people are thought to have died under the Khmer Rouge, a Maoist regime that controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.
This year 2010, Duch became the first senior Khmer Rouge leader to be convicted by the UN-backed tribunal after a journalist found him in hiding a decade earlier. He was sentenced in 2012.
He died on Wednesday, aged 77, a spokesman for the tribunal in the administrative centre Phnom Penh said, without giving details of the cause. He had been ill for several years."Duch died today at 00:52am, on 2 September at Khmer Soviet Friendship Hospital. Details of what he died of, I can't tell," the spokesman said.
Duch's testimony at the tribunal was a landmark moment for Cambodians who had suffered beneath the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign, and future generations.While prison chief at Tuol Sleng, Duch maintained a huge archive of photos and documents, including thousands of prisoner "confessions", that revealed many areas of the Khmer Rouge's inner workings. In addition they helped prosecutors trace the ultimate months of a large number of inmates' lives.
In Phnom Penh, there have been mixed feelings about his death. "If he stayed alive then we might still hear more of the annals from him for the younger generation and folks," one man told Reuters news agency.Another resident said that she would never forget his crimes. "He deserves to serve more prison terms. However now he has died, I can forgive him and his case is completed."
Comrade Duch ran Phnom Penh's S-21 prison, often known as Tuol Sleng, the most notorious Khmer Rouge torture site.It is thought that at least 15,000 men, women and children deemed enemies of the regime passed through the gates of the former school-turned-prison.
Most of them were tortured, forced to confess to fictitious crimes against the Khmer Rouge and put to death at the so-called "killing fields" just outside the capital.Prisoners were at first officials from the old government, persons accused of being middle class and later mainly Khmer Rouge members suspected of disloyalty.
The guards, who were often teenagers, forced the prisoners to create detailed confessions to whatever these were accused of and implicate family and friends who were then imprisoned subsequently.
Those who survived the torture where eventually taken up to the "killing fields" at Choeung Ek where these were killed,sometimes after digging their own mass graves.Fewer than twelve prisoners survived Tuol Sleng.
