CAMBODIA:A Cambodian court charged former Khmer Rouge president Khieu Samphan yesterday with crimes against humanity. He is expected to face trial next year.
The French-educated guerrilla leader, who has denied knowledge of any atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge during its 1975-1979 reign of terror, also stands accused of war crimes, a court spokesman said.
Khieu Samphan (78) was arrested by armed police after his release from a Phnom Penh hospital earlier yesterday. He was then taken to court, where he faced Cambodian and foreign judges investigating one of the 20th century's darkest chapters.
"The court has formally charged Khieu Samphan with crimes against humanity and war crimes," the court spokesman said.
Khieu Samphan, the fifth senior Khmer Rouge cadre to be arrested since the $56 million (€38.2 million) court got under way in earnest this year, was put under provisional detention for one year. His lawyers planned to appeal the detention order.
A close adviser of Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan has previously portrayed himself as a virtual prisoner of the regime and denied knowledge of any atrocities as Pol Pot drove his dream of creating an agrarian peasant utopia.
About 1.7 million people were executed or died of torture, disease or starvation under the ultra-Maoist revolution.
In a book published last week, Khieu Samphan defended Pol Pot and blamed rogue regional commanders for betraying the regime by treating people badly.
"They were stupid, brutal, and looked down on the life of human beings. They were the source of all kinds of violations," he wrote in Considering Cambodia's History - From the Beginning to Democratic Kampuchea, the country's name under Pol Pot.
Khieu Samphan will be co-defended by controversial French lawyer Jacques Vergès.
Mr Vergès, whose previous clients have included Carlos the Jackal and Klaus Barbie, said in 2004 that Khieu Samphan had no blood on his hands and was just a young idealist embroiled in the politics of the cold war.
Khieu Samphan was the leading intellectual among a group of Cambodian students in 1950s Paris who became imbued with communism and returned home to form the core of the guerrilla movement that became the Khmer Rouge.