Khmer Rouge jailer at UN hearing
Khmer Rouge secret police head Kaing Guek Eav - also known as Duch - appears at bail hearing
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Tuesday, 20, Nov 2007 10:56
The former head of the Khmer Rouge secret police has become the first member of Pol Pot's genocidal regime to appear in an open court hearing.
Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, is at the UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia to appeal against his continued detention.
The 66-year-old has been held without charge since being arrested in 1999. He is among five former Khmer Rouge members awaiting trial over charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
"My name is Kaing Guek Eav. I am 66 years old," Duch said today as the hearing began.
"I launched the appeal because I have been detained without trial for eight years, six months and ten days."
His lawyers claim his detention is unlawful but the prosecution says that the ex-prison chief would flee into hiding if he was released.
Duch was in charge of Khmer Rouge's main interrogation centre in Phnom Penh, the notorious Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison.
Only about ten of the 17,000 people estimated to have passed through its doors are thought to have survived; the rest tortured to death for allegedly being CIA spies.
At least one million people were killed under Pol Pot's Communist movement between 1975 and 1979.
The Marxist regime was attempting to send the south-east Asian nation back to 'year zero' in a bucolic utopia; forcibly emptying cities and abolishing money and religion.
Some estimates put the total death toll at 2.5 million in one of the worst genocides of the 20th century as people died in their hundreds of thousands through starvation, illness, working in labour camps and the systematic execution of anyone suspected of being an intellectual.