Pol Pot is dead.
That is the unshakeable conviction of the few foreigners who viewed his rapidly decaying corpse in Khmer Rouge-controlled jungle just inside the Cambodian border.
But there the certainty ends. In death, the enigma and mystery that surrounded so much of his life is thriving.
Wherever you look the hard facts are at best elusive - perhaps appropriate for a man whose leadership of most extreme Maoist revolution in history was concealed from the West until 1976 - a year after his forces took power.
Was he murdered or did he really suffer a heart attack? Was he really going to be handed over last week for international war crimes hearings as some reports claim? Even the militant, austere atheism that ruled his earliest days as a left-leaning student in Paris is under question.
The Post learnt on Saturday that his young peasant wife held a private Buddhist ceremony in front of his corpse an hour before it was torched in the most ignominious of cremations.