"According to Duch, only four methods of torture were allowed: beating, electrocution, placing a plastic bag over the head and pouring water into the nose."Īccording to the statement, Duch was also aware that some prisoners had their fingers and toenails removed while others were forced to eat their own excrement.ĭuch methodically recorded the treatment of each prisoner in thousands of documents that were found in the compound after the Khmer Rouge fell in January 1979. "Interrogators used several forms of torture in order to extract confessions from prisoners," the indictment said. The lengthy document - read aloud by court officials over a period of several hours on Monday - indicated that every prisoner who arrived at the Phnom Penh torture centre known as S-21, or Tuol Sleng was destined for execution.ĭuch's job was to obtain confessions of counterrevolutionary activity before sending the prisoners - men, women and children - to their deaths.
Alex Hinton, director of Rutgers University's Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, who was in the courtroom. The indictment read Monday spells out a record of the period in "more detail than we've ever had before," said Prof. Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as Duch, is charged with committing crimes against humanity and war crimes, as well as torture and homicide for his role running a prison where as many as 16,000 people were brutally tortured before being sent to their deaths.ĭuch, 66, is the first of five officials from Pol Pot's hardcore communist regime that from 1975 to 1979 turned Cambodia into a vast labour camp and killing field. A genocide tribunal in Cambodia heard a lengthy litany of Khmer Rouge horrors on Monday to begin the substantive phase of the first trial against a member of the brutal regime that ruled the country decades ago.
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