|
PHNOM PENH: A former Khmer Rouge prison chief was
Tuesday handed over to Cambodia’s UN-backed tribunal in the most
concrete move so far to try those responsible for the country’s
genocide.
Duch, whose real name is Kang Kek
Ieu, was the only Khmer Rouge figure in custody ahead of
Cambodia’s long-stalled genocide trials. He had been held in a
military prison since 1999.
“The tribunal has issued a
warrant asking to transfer Duch and we handed him over this morning
to the tribunal,” said Ngin Sam An, a military court investigating
judge who has overseen Duch’s case since his arrest.
“He will be kept there. He will
not be sent back to military prison,” he told AFP.
According to a copy of a
Khmer-language arrest warrant issued Monday by tribunal
investigating judges, Duch was to be brought to the tribunal. It
indicated that he would be held at the tribunal’s newly built
detention center.
Tribunal officials said that Duch
was being questioned by the judges, who were expected to issue a
judicial order that would see the 65-year-old formally detained by
the court.
“Duch was brought for an
initial interview,” spokesman Reach Sambath told AFP, stressing
that Duch was not yet convicted of any crimes.
Duch is one of five former
leaders widely thought to be under investigation.
His transfer to the tribunal is a
significant step in Cambodia’s efforts to try those responsible
for one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
Up to two million people died of
starvation and overwork, or were executed, under the Khmer
Rouge’s 1975-79 communist regime.
The Khmer Rouge also abolished
religion, schools and currency, exiling millions to vast collective
farms in a bid to create an agrarian utopia.
These crimes were part of a
“common criminal plan constituting a systematic and unlawful
denial of basic rights,” prosecutors said earlier this month after
submitting their cases for investigation.
The names of all those under
investigation have not been made public.
But prosecutors are reportedly
also seeking charges of genocide and other crimes against former
Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan, as well as regime leader
Pol Pot’s deputy Nuon Chea and foreign minister Ieng Sary.
Duch ran the Khmer Rouge’s
notorious Tuol Sleng prison, a former high school that was converted
into a torture center.
Some 16,000 men, women and
children were brutalized there for months before being taken to the
outskirts of the capital and executed.
But his lawyer, Kar Savuth, said
Duch—who taught mathematics before becoming a communist
revolutionary in the late 1960s—was not guilty of any crimes and
was only following “verbal orders from the top.”
“He had no rights to arrest or
kill anyone,” Kar Savuth told AFP.
Tuol Sleng, in the center of
Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, has been turned into a genocide
museum and is a popular tourist attraction.
--AFP
|
