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SCMP Reporter

Pol Pot was laid out on what appeared to be a new mattress in a humble plank hut, his head propped on a pink pillow, eyes and mouth slightly open in a gaunt, yellowed face.

 His nostrils were stuffed with cotton and a garland of red fuchsias was wrapped around his deeply wattled neck. An overpowering smell of formaldehyde filled the air.

 A water bottle and a hand fan were the only signs of his last possessions. Under the bed, as if he had just stepped out of them, were a pair of rubber slippers.

 Like an emissary from hell, the Khmer Rouge spokesman had emerged from the steamy jungle to tell us Satan was dead.

 'Pol Pot has had a heart attack . . . I am happy,' Nuan Nou, a senior cadre under new commander Ta Mok, said across the bamboo stakes and razor wire that ringed the ultra-Maoists' last stronghold.

 'Now the bad images are gone - now there will not be the accusations any more.'  I was one of about 30 journalists in a convoy of vehicles winding its way down a dusty jungle path from a Thai military base near the Cambodian border.

 At the border, the military officer brought us to a halt beside some bamboo stakes. We could see Khmer Rouge soldiers in the jungle across the clearing.

 We got out. Waited. And out of the undergrowth walked a Khmer Rouge cadre. He spoke to the Thai officer at the head of our group and walked away.

 Moments later, a four-wheel-drive vehicle roared up, the cadre got out and said only four journalists - all photographers - could go with him.

 A mad scramble - and then off they went through the jungle to view history.

 About 600 metres down the red dirt path, Pol Pot - said to be 73 - lay in death as he had spent so much of his life - a man alone.

 The man accused of murdering more than a million countrymen would be cremated in three days, the cadres told the four photographers present.

 Outside the hut, his second wife and young daughter sat grief-stricken, but not crying, avoiding contact. A few young Khmer Rouge soldiers wandered about, apparently curious but displaying no signs of mourning.

 The air was still, pressing in the dry-season heat. The silence was only interrupted by an occasional mortar and artillery round from the surrounding hills that mark the border between northeast Thailand and Cambodia.

 About three kilometres away in a similar small gathering of huts was Pol Pot's last safe-house. According to Nuan Nou, Pol Pot returned to the two-storey dwelling with his wife and daughter on Wednesday afternoon after a 'normal day'.

 'Before he died, he got a headache,' he said. About 8 pm he went upstairs to bed. His wife went up to see him about 11.15, having forgotten to cover him in a mosquito net.

 'She touched Pol Pot's body - he was cold and stiff.'  His wife raced to tell Nuan Nou, who was the link between Pol Pot during his recent house arrest and Ta Mok, the man who deposed him. Ta Mok's hatred is now so great, Nuan Nou warned, that the man known as 'the butcher' had yet to view the body.

 When asked how they could be sure Pol Pot had died of a heart attack, he said simply: 'Pol Pot has suffered heart trouble for many years.'  Nuan Nou spoke after walking calmly across 50 metres of no-man's-land from a checkpoint where a dozen young Khmer Rouge soldiers sat playing with puppies and loosening their red scarves in the heat.

 Top Thai military officials watched with interest nearby.

 Their own photographers were believed to be the first outsiders to view his corpse yesterday morning, reflecting long-held relations.

 Thailand's Suranaree Special Taskforce commander Wiwat Sakkarak insisted the corpse was that of Pol Pot and that his hair had been dyed.

 'If we take a good look at the roots of his hair, they are white,' he said.

 Agencies reported that Khmer Rouge guerilla officer Khem Noun said at the guerillas' former stronghold, Anlong Veng: 'What I can tell you is that he was quite old and he dropped his life like a ripe fruit.

 'They [the international community] were too late. They delayed things and now we are blamed for his death.'  The US State Department last night backed a call by the Government in Phnom Penh for an autopsy to be performed.

 'We support the Cambodian government's call for an autopsy. We believe this should be done by a reputable organisation,' said State Department spokesman James Rubin.

 Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said he suspected at first that Pol Pot might have been killed by his own people.

 He said the reviled former leader 'certainly died conveniently for the Khmer Rouge leadership if he died a natural death'.

 American journalist Sydney Schanberg, whose book spawned the film The Killing Fields, said: 'The only sad thing about . . . his death is that he was never brought to trial before an international tribunal.'  Dith Pran, the Cambodian whose suffering was portrayed in the film, said: 'The story doesn't end with Pol Pot, we have to try to bring his inner circle to trial . . . maybe six or 10 people we know are responsible for the killing.' 



An old man's body lies alone: Pol Pot dies in steamy jungle