One of Pol Pot's former Khmer Rouge henchmen has admitted for the first time that mass murders were committed during the ultra-Maoist movement's four-year "Killing Fields" regime during the 1970s.
No Khmer Rouge leader has ever faced credible justice for the estimated 1.7 million people who died in the genocide, many of them tortured and executed. Others died of starvation, disease or overwork in vast rural labour camps.
But with a United Nations-backed genocide trial likely to get under way in 2004, former Khmer Rouge president Khieu Samphan (73) has acknowledged that mass killings did take place under the Khmer Rouge's 1975-79 administration.
However, in a letter sent to local media and obtained by journalists today, Khieu Samphan said he only recently became aware of some of the killings after seeing a film about the notorious S-21 interrogation and torture centre in the capital Phnom Penh.
"Between 1976-78 I was not aware and I did not hear about S-21 at all," he said. "But now I understand that S-21 was a state institution located in Phnom Penh. It was part of the regime," he said. Out of the more than 10,000 documented S-21 prisoners, the real total is probably far higher, only seven survived.
After weeks of interrogation involving anything from electric whips to thumb screws, prisoners were driven to the outskirts of the city where they were shot or clubbed to death in mass graves.
Khieu Samphan, one of those almost certain to face the genocide trial, also denied responsibility for the overall tragedy which befell Cambodia, saying the country became a pawn sucked up in the polarised politics of the Cold War and the American war in neighbouring Vietnam.