PHNOM PENH (AFP) – Khmer Rouge torture chief Duch once taught math to schoolchildren, but put his cold, calculating mind to far more devastating use as head of a jail from which few inmates ever came out alive.
The 68-year-old – whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav — oversaw the extermination of around 15,000 men, women and children at the Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia’s capital during the communist regime’s brutal 1975-1979 rule.
Those who worked under him at the detention centre testified that Duch was universally feared. Most of the staff were uneducated teenage boys and Duch said they could be easily indoctrinated because they were “like a blank piece of paper.”
Duch begged for forgiveness at Cambodia’s UN-backed war crimes court for crimes committed under his command at the jail, where prisoners were tortured into denouncing themselves and others as foreign spies.
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