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Former Duke Hassan, commander of the most brutal detention center under the Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime and sentenced to life in prison, died at the age of 77.
Kang Gwek Yves, known as “Duke,” “died in hospital,” said Net Fektra, a spokesman for the UN-sponsored Cambodian court that is trying senior Khmer Rouge officials.
No explanation was given of the causes of his death.
“He has been suffering from lung disease for years,” a source told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Duke was the director of Tuol Slang or S21, Phnom Penh’s infamous central prison, where 15,000 people were tortured and later executed by the Khmer Rouge.
Captives of the Khmer Rouge
AP
The extreme Maoist dictatorship of the Khmer Rouge was established on April 17, 1975 and collapsed on January 7, 1979 in the wake of the chariots of socialist Vietnam. Meanwhile, around two million people died.
Kang Guek Yves was the first Khmer Rouge to be convicted by a war crimes tribunal.
He was sentenced in the first instance in 2010 to 30 years in prison. Then, two years later, in the second instance, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Duke was born on November 17, 1942, in a town in Kombong Thom province, north of Phnom Penh, and was a math teacher before joining the Khmer Rouge in 1967.
After the fall of the regime, he continued to belong to the movement and later worked for humanitarian organizations.
After hiding for years, he was located in 1999 by an Irish photographer, Nick Dunlop, and arrested.
Before his judges, in his first trial, he explained in detail the importance of the volume of documents found in prison after the fall of the regime and the process by which the tortured were later transferred to a place of execution a few kilometers from there.
According to AMPE, Duke embraced Christianity in the 1990s, apologized to the few survivors and the families of the victims, and accepted his sentence of “the most severe punishment.”
Ο Kaing Guek Eav
AP
But the accused then abandoned this strategy of confessions and cooperation with justice and demanded his release as a self-proclaimed simple secretary of the regime.
The prosecution described “the enthusiasm and diligence with which he carried out each of his missions,” but also his “pride” in running the torture center as well as “his indifference to the suffering” of others.
French ethnologist François Bizet, Duke’s prisoner in the jungle for three months in 1971, spoke of “the fundamental sincerity of a man … willing to give his life for the Revolution and who carried it out. He has entrusted him. “
In the end, Duke “had no regrets,” said Yuk Sang, director of the Cambodia Documentation Center, an investigative organization that provided extensive evidence in court. I hope his death “brings some relief to the survivors and that the dead can finally rest in peace.”
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