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Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Comrade Duch, has been hospitalized for several years for a lung disease: On Wednesday, the 77-year-old was confirmed dead at a hospital in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, various media reported.
Duch served a life sentence for crimes against humanity and war crimes when he was the head of the Khmer Rouge S-21 torture prison, also known as Tuol Sleng. Between 1.5 and 3 million people, a quarter of Cambodia’s population, died in the genocide under the dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979.
At least 14,000 people, including women and young children, were executed in the torture prison.
Duch was the first Khmer Rouge commander to be convicted in 2010. He himself has claimed that he only followed the verbal orders of his superiors. As director of the prison, he personally supervised the torture and executions of party members and soldiers who had fallen from grace.
Only a few of Tuol Sleng’s inmates survived. Cambodians accused of being enemies of the Maoist revolution were imprisoned and those executed were buried in a nearby area called “Death Field”.
In 1979, Vietnam toppled the Khmer Rouge and Duch was believed to have been killed in the fighting. Just twenty years later, a journalist revealed that the prison director was working as a converted Christian with a new identity in an aid organization.
Read more: First indictment for mass murder in Cambodia
