The murderous Khmer Rouge regime's most senior surviving leader was arrested yesterday, plucked from his home in the Cambodian jungle to face justice at the country's long-delayed genocide trials.
Nuon Chea, now 82 and once the most trusted lieutenant of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, is the first of a small group of former top cadres living freely to be arrested by the new UN-backed tribunal.
A correspondent saw police take him from his remote home and drive him to a helicopter, which flew him to Phnom Penh to be processed by the fledgling tribunal that will put him on trial.
PHOTO: EPA
"He was brought before the office of the co-investigating judges ... on execution of an arrest warrant," tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath said in the capital.
He said Nuon Chea would be informed of the charges being brought against him, but did not say what those would be.
Nuon Chea, known in the regime's revolutionary circles as "Brother No. 2," was allegedly a key architect of the execution policies of the Khmer Rouge, who are blamed for the deaths of up to two million people.
But in a July interview, he said he had no blood on his hands.
"I was not involved in the killing of people," he said. "I don't know who was responsible."
Officials from the genocide court swept in at dawn to seize him. Ou Boran, a relative, said that authorities had been searching the house for documents and correspondence.
Hundreds of villagers gathered in stunned silence as a convoy of nearly a dozen police and genocide court vehicles escorted him to the helicopter.
"He was shaking. His legs looked like they would collapse," said neighbor Sok Sothera.
Nuon Chea's rank in the communist hierarchy and his alleged decision-making role would make him the most significant defendant to be tried for crimes committed under the 1975 to 1979 regime by the tribunal, which was established last year.
The regime abolished religion, schools and currency and exiled millions to vast collective farms in a bid to create an agrarian utopia. Up to 2 million people died of starvation, disease or overwork or were executed.
He had been living freely since surrendering to the government in late 1998.
Only one other suspect, a Khmer Rouge jailor known as Duch, has been detained by the court.
Duch headed the notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, where as many as 16,000 men, women and children were brutalized before being killed.
Many were allegedly sent there by Nuon Chea.
In their book Seven Candidates for Prosecution, genocide scholars Stephen Heder and Brian Tittemore said that he "gave orders to Duch, some in writing, to execute specific officials and groups."
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