Lawyers for the former chief torturer of Cambodia’s genocidal Khmer Rouge yesterday requested his release from prison, one day after he made a historic public apology and admitted guilt before a UN-backed tribunal.
Kaing Guek Eav, known by his revolutionary alias Duch, faces charges of crimes against humanity, torture, premeditated murder and breaches of the Geneva Conventions, but defense lawyers said his almost 10 years of pre-trial detention violated international law and the Cambodian Constitution.
“Based on the facts, on Cambodian law and international precedents, there is no legal basis for the pre-trial detention,” Duch’s French Lawyer Francois Roux said. “His detention should have only lasted three years.”
PHOTO: AFP
Roux said his client should be released for the duration of his trial, which began on Monday and is expected to run until mid-July, and transferred to a “safe house.”
In the first trial before the tribunal, the 66-year-old former mathematics teacher faces a maximum sentence of life in prison for crimes he allegedly committed as head of the notorious Tuol Sleng torture prison in Phnom Penh during the ultra-Maoist regime’s 1975 to 1979 reign.
Duch on Tuesday begged his victims, their families, and the country for forgiveness, declaring he was responsible for thousands of deaths for which he felt “heartfelt sorrow.”
“May I be permitted to apologize to the survivors of the regime and the families of the victims who had loved ones who died brutally,” he said. “I ask them to please open a window and let me ask for forgiveness.”
It was the first time any Khmer Rouge leader or apparatchik had made such an apology.
Duch is one of five former Khmer Rouge leaders facing trial for the deaths of up to 2 million people who were executed or died of starvation or overwork as the fanatical regime sought to transform Cambodian society into a socialist utopia and erase history.
Cambodian co-prosecutor Chea Leang argued that Duch should not be released from detention because his personal safety would be at risk and social order would be jeopardized.
Duch sat impassively through yesterday morning’s session, occasionally taking notes and gazing into the 500-seat public gallery.
Toch Mom, a 50-year-old Buddhist monk who came to watch the trial said he believed Duch’s apology was genuine.
“I believe he is telling the truth when he says he’s sorry,” he said. “I lost six family members because of the Khmer Rouge, so I am here to see justice in action.”
Earlier this week the court was told that prisoners were routinely tortured, shackled in tiny cells for almost 24 hours a day, were not permitted to speak unless being interrogated, received barely any food and were “forced to urinate in jerry cans and defecate in ammunition boxes.”
More than 12,000 men, women and children were tortured at the prison and most were sent to be murdered at the Cheong Ek “Killing Fields.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack