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Khmer Rouge chief torturer seeks acquittal
Fri Nov 27, 2009 9:17am EST
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By Ek Madra
PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - The Khmer Rouge's chief torturer and jailer shocked a U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal on Friday by asking to be freed at the end of a nine-month trial of the first member of the ultra-communist regime to face justice.
Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, said he was only following orders and blamed top Khmer Rouge leaders for the killing of more than 14,000 people in the 1970s at his notorious S-21 prison in a suburb of Cambodian capital Phnom Penh.
"I would like the court to release me," he said.
The chamber of three Cambodian and two foreign judges asked Duch's lawyer for clarification, questioning whether there was a mistake in translating his statement from the Khmer language.
"When my client asked for release, he means because he was not the senior leader of the Khmer Rouge," said Kar Savuth, a co-defense lawyer who has argued throughout the trial Duch's life was at stake when he ordered torture and murder.
Duch is accused of "crimes against humanity, enslavement, torture, sexual abuses and other inhumane acts" as commander of S-21 during one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century, when 1.7 million people died under the Khmer Rouge's 1975-79 "killings fields" reign of terror.
Only seven of 14,000 people who passed through S-21 survived.
Witnesses in 72 days of hearings spoke of prisoners being beaten to death with metal pipes, electrocuted, starved, raped, forced to eat their own excrement or bleeding to death at S-21, a converted high school also known as Tuol Sleng.
Prosecutors say Duch, a 67-year-old former maths teacher, was "ideologically of the same mind" as the Khmer Rouge leaders and did nothing to stop prison guards from inflicting torture.
Lead prosecutor William Smith told the court this week "the accused was neither a prisoner, nor a hostage, nor a victim. He was an idealist, a revolutionary, a crusader ... prepared to torture and kill willingly for the good of the revolution."
Now a born-again Christian, Duch expressed "excruciating remorse" on Wednesday for the S-21 victims, most of them tortured and forced to confess to spying and other crimes before they were bludgeoned to death.
"This accused person is a real criminal. He is behind the crimes committed at S-21. He was the secretary of the S-21 who oversaw all administrations, the management of the whole function of the center," co-prosecutor Chea Leang told the court.
A verdict is expected by March. Duch faces up to life in prison, but prosecutors have sought a 40-year prison sentence. Cambodia does not have capital punishment.
"POLITICAL HOSTAGE"
The tribunal seeks justice for nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population who perished from execution, overwork or torture during the Khmer Rouge's agrarian revolution, which ended with the 1979 invasion by Vietnam. Continued...
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