Cambodian Khmer Rouge cadre owns up to burning four Westerners to ashes
Foreigners were killed because they had trespassed into Cambodian waters
The first member of Cambodia’s notorious Khmer Rouge regime jailed for the 1970s “Killing Fields” atrocities admitted on Thursday brutally murdering four unidentified Westerners and burning their bodies with piles of tyres.
Kaing Guek Eav, alias “Duch”, is testifying at an international tribunal’s long-running second case against the deputies of late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, whose four-year reign of terror in pursuit of a peasant utopia killed at least 1.8 million Cambodians.
Duch said “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea had personally instructed him to execute four Westerners, including two Americans, at a school that was turned into a torture centre, where more than 14,000 people were killed.
He said the foreigners were killed because they had trespassed into Cambodian waters. The identity of the foreigners remains unknown. “They were interrogated and smashed per instruction,” Duch told the court. “They had to be burnt to ashes so there is no evidence that foreigners were smashed by us.”
Most of the Khmer Rouge victims died of starvation, torture, exhaustion or disease in labour camps, or were bludgeoned to death during mass executions carried out across the country.
The majority of Cambodians alive now were born after the bloody era and are enjoying a peace and growth and embracing the capitalism the Khmer Rouge had deplored.