The former chief torturer "Duk", commander of the most terrible detention center under Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime and sentenced to life, died today at the age of 77.
Kang Gwek Iw, known as "Duk," "died in hospital," said Nate Phektra, a spokesman for the UN-sponsored Cambodian tribunal trying key Khmer Rouge officials.
No clarification was given on the causes of his death.
"He had been suffering from a lung disease for years," a source who asked not to be named told AFP.
Duc was the warden of Tuol Sleng, or S21, the infamous central prison in Phnom Penh, where 15,000 people were tortured and then executed by the Khmer Rouge.
The extreme Maoist Khmer Rouge dictatorship was established on April 17, 1975 and collapsed on January 7, 1979 under the tank tracks of socialist Vietnam. In the meantime, approximately two million people had been killed.
Kang Gwek Iw was the first Khmer Rouge to be convicted by a court of war crimes.
He was sentenced to 30 years in prison at first instance in 2010. Then, two years later, in the second degree, he was sentenced to life in prison.
Duc was born on November 17, 1942 in a village in Kompong Thom province, north of Phnom Penh, and was a mathematics teacher before joining the Khmer Rouge in 1967.
After the fall of the regime, he continued to belong to the movement and then worked for humanitarian organizations.
After years in hiding, he was tracked down in 1999 by an Irish photographer, Nick Dunlop, and arrested.
Before his judges, at his first trial, he explained at length the significance of the volume of documents discovered in the prison after the fall of the regime and the process by which the tortured were then transported to an execution site a few kilometers from there.
As reported by AMPE, Duke converted to Christianity in the 1990s, apologized to the few survivors and the families of the victims and accepted his sentence "to the severest penalty".
But the accused then abandoned this strategy of confessions and cooperation with justice and asked for his release as a self-described simple secretary of the regime.
The prosecution described "the enthusiasm and diligence with which he carried out each of his missions", but also his "pride" in running the torture center as well as his "indifference to the suffering" of others.
The French ethnologist Francois Bizot, who remained for three months in 1971 a prisoner of the Duc in the jungle, spoke of "the fundamental sincerity of a man (...) ready to give his life for the Revolution and who carried out the mission assigned to him".
In the end, Duc had "no remorse," says Yuk Sang, head of the Cambodia Documentation Center, a research organization that provided numerous pieces of evidence to the court. I hope his death "will bring some relief to the survivors and that the dead can finally rest in peace."
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