Phnom Penh - Documents showed 177 prisoners were released
from the Khmer Rouge's notorious S-21 torture centre, the
Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam) told local media Thursday
in a dramatic turnaround from previous statements that only seven
people had survived.
DC-Cam previously maintained only a handful of people had survived
the torture centre by the time the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979 and up to
16,000 had died there. DC-Cam is credited with archiving thousands of
documents left by the 1975-79 Democratic Kampuchea regime and being
the foremost documentary authority on it.
DC-Cam has supplied the bulk of documentary evidence to the joint
UN-Cambodian court set up to try former leaders of the Khmer Rouge.
'These are documents sitting there for the past 30 years,' the
English-language Cambodia Daily quoted DC-Cam director Youk Chhang as
saying.
Chhang said the 177 released prisoners should 'not be considered
survivors as they had been spared by their captors.'
He was unavailable for comment Thursday as to why DC-Cam had not
drawn public attention to the historically invaluable documents
earlier nor perused testimonies of released prisoners before the
indictment of former S-21 jailer Kaing Guek Euv, alias Duch, if it
knew of them.
In July 2007, DC-Cam initially disputed the claims of Chim Math,
who was subsequently recognized by others as S-21's first known
female survivor, saying no available documents supported her claims.
It was unclear if the new evidence would affect the defence case
for Duch, who was expected to face court as early as October.
Duch is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity and
has not denied overseeing the centre, where men, women and children
were beaten, starved and subjected to horrors, including being forced
to wear buckets of live scorpions on their heads.
In his August 8 indictment, the co-investigating judges upheld the
previously held theory that nobody was ever released.
Up to 2 million Cambodians perished under the ultra-Maoist Khmer
Rouge regime.
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