40 Years Demanded for Khmer Rouge Prison Chief 'Comrade Duch'

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6930876.ece
Cambodian prosecutors in the war crimes trial of the Khmer Rouge's former prison chief have demanded a 40 year jail sentence for the part he played in murdering thousands of Cambodians and spreading terror across Cambodia.

Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, was the director of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of Cambodians were sent to be tortured and killed at the height of Pol Pot's genocidal regime.

Notoriously brutal, Duch encouraged the jail's interrogation teams to apply ever harsher torture techniques to their victims, including cutting off their fingers and toes, forcing them to eat their own excrement and literally bleeding them to death. The jail's chief executioner Him Huy told The Times that his boss used to like to watch the executioners at work Cheong Ek, known as the Killing Fields, where prisoners were bludgeoned to death.

Under Duch's directorship, 17000 men, women and children who had been accused of disloyalty were taken to Tuol Sleng - known as S-21- to be interrogated until they implicated friends, relatives and even people they had never met in fantastical 'plots' against the regime. Then they were killed. There was no reprieve; of the thousnds who passed through the gates of S-21 between 1977 - 1979, only 15 emerged alive.

Full article at link

Duch is the only former member of Pol Pot's inner circle to admit his guilt. Four other Khmer Rouge leaders will follow him into the dock, although it is expected that their trials will not begin until 2011.

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You know, western democracy has to set an example and act humanely and all that, but for war-criminals and those guilty of genocide, is life-imprisonment always enough? I don't remember the Khmer Rouge personally, but I saw that film The Killing Fields and I've read about it. The description here of what was done on this man's shift, is horrifying. I don't support the death penalty generally, I don't believe we have the right to take away someone's life, not even for the sake of justice; but I begin to wonder if lethal injection is the only way to go with people like this...