Human-rights workers have investigated hundreds of political murders, but no one has ever been convicted. Many saw the Khmer Rouge tribunal as a first step toward ending the “culture of impunity” in Cambodia, a country plagued by violence. A born-again Christian, Duch expressed what appeared to be genuine remorse: “I feel very bad about the killings … there were many who were innocent.” As a result of his extraordinary confession, he was arrested and taken to Phnom Penh to await trial. Finally, with journalist Nate Thayer, we confronted Duch and he confessed to his role as executioner, establishing the chain of command and revealing that the Khmer Rouge had deliberately planned mass murder. I was wandering around taking photographs when a small, wiry man walked up to me and introduced himself. But in early 1999, with the war between the Cambodian government and the Khmer Rouge finally over, I hitched a ride with Canadian sappers into a former Khmer Rouge zone. He was a key link between the Khmer Rouge leadership and the killing. I believed that if there was one man who could shed light on this period, it was Duch. By 1998, I began carrying a photograph of Duch, taken from the prison when the Khmer Rouge were in power, and asking people if anyone recognized him. Now, Duch is gone, too he died last week, at the age of 77, serving out his life sentence as the first former Khmer Rouge leader to be tried and convicted at the UN-backed court in Cambodia.įor me, as a photographer during the war, Duch – who had disappeared after the fall of the Khmer Rouge – became something of an obsession. Though they number in the thousands, they are but a small representation of the many horrors inflicted by the infamous regime those responsible for the killings had never faced international justice.

The prison has become a museum, its walls adorned with mug shots of arriving prisoners. Today, the Khmer Rouge are gone, ousted by Vietnam in 1979 and finally defeated by the Cambodian government in 1999 after years of guerrilla war. In S-21, a man named Comrade Duch – Pol Pot’s chief executioner and the former head of the Khmer Rouge secret police – led the killings as the prison’s commandant. In a prison known as S-21, more than 12,000 Cambodian men, women and children were tortured and killed, some of the two million people who died under the Khmer Rouge between 1975 to 1979. Nic Dunlop is a photographer and author of The Lost Executioner: The Story of Comrade Duch and the Khmer Rouge.

The lost executioner by nic dunlop