Khmer Rouge Trial: Prosecutors Say Releasing Duch Would Spark Public Outrage

Photo: Duch's day in court.

PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA: Prosecutors urged a U.N.-backed genocide tribunal Wednesday (21 Nov) to deny bail to the former head of the Khmer Rouge's largest torture center, saying his release could pose a threat to public order in Cambodia.
Kaing Guek Eav _ alias Duch _ is charged with committing crimes against humanity as the commandant of the regime's notorious Tuol Sleng prison. He is one of five people held in connection with the communist regime's brutal 1970s rule of Cambodia.
Duch has been in custody since 1999. He became the first defendant to appear before the long-awaited tribunal when his bail hearing opened Tuesday (20 Nov). His defense lawyers argued that Duch's human rights were being violated by his long detention and he should be freed on bail ahead of trials expected to start next year.
Prosecutors called Duch a "flight risk" and urged the court Wednesday to keep him behind bars _ for his own safety and in the interest of public order.
If Duch were released he could be harmed both by "accomplices wishing to silence him and by the relatives of victims seeking revenge," Robert Petit, a prosecutor from Canada, told the court.
Petit added that "the entire public order (could) be jeopardized" if the aging Khmer Rouge official were freed.
The Khmer Rouge regime was blamed for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people during its reign from 1975-79. Many have said they feared the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders might die before being brought to justice, as did the movement's notorious leader, Pol Pot, in 1998.
Duch, now 66, was the commandant of the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, also known as S-21. As many as 16,000 men, women and children were tortured there before being executed outside the capital at the site known as "the killing fields." Only 14 people are thought to have survived.
Graying and frail, Duch took the witness stand for a second day Wednesday dressed in the same white polo shirt he wore a day earlier.
At Tuesday's hearing he was relaxed and polite. He stood when asked to tell the court his name and pressed his palms together in a sign of respect for the judges.
His lawyers, countryman Kar Savuth and Francois Roux of France, argued that he should be released because his human rights had been violated during the eight years he already spent in a Cambodian military prison on war crimes charges before being transferred to the tribunal's custody in July.
Duch was a former schoolteacher with leftist sympathies and then deputy principal of a provincial college before joining the Khmer Rouge in 1970.
After the Khmer Rouge was toppled, Duch disappeared for almost two decades, living under different names in a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in northwestern Cambodia, where missionaries converted him to Christianity. His chance discovery by a Western photojournalist led to his arrest in May 1999.
Duch has said he was simply following orders from the top to save his own life. "I was under other people's command, and I would have died if I disobeyed it," he told a government interrogator after his arrest.
Former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan, 76, was arrested Monday and charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Last week, authorities arrested Ieng Sary, the Khmer Rouge's ex-foreign minister, and his wife Ieng Thirith, its social affairs minister. Both were charged with crimes against humanity; Ieng Sary was also charged with war crimes.
Former Khmer Rouge ideologist Nuon Chea was detained in September on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. (By SOPHENG CHEANG/ AP)