News Khmer

'I received an order from my superiors that the four Westerners had to be smashed and burned to ashes,' he said. 'It was an absolute order from my superiors. Pol Pot, not Uncle Nuon' - the regime's second in command - 'personally ordered to burn the bodies.'
But yesterday, after the detailed claim was made that one of the Westerners was still alive when a tyre was put around his neck and set alight, Duch denied that the prisoner had met such a fate.

'It's hard for me to believe that the prisoner was burned alive,' he said.

'I believe that nobody would dare to violate my order. They had to be killed and then burned to ash.'

Before his capture and execution, Mr Dewhirst was on a dream voyage with his friends cruising the Gulf of Thailand.

Then they were captured at gunpoint by a Khmer Rouge gunboat when they strayed too close to the Cambodian coast and were accused of being spies.

Mr Dewhirst was forced to make a signed confession that he was a CIA agent, having been recruited by his father at the age of 12.

His father, he was forced to erroneously claim, was a CIA agent whose cover was that of a secondary school headmaster.

In signing the confession, he had also signed his own death warrant.

The only Briton to die in the killing fields, Mr Dewhirst was executed just a few weeks before Pol Pot's regime was overthrown by invading forces from Vietnam.

Kaing Guek Eav has told the U.N.-backed genocide tribunal that he wanted to apologise for his actions under the Khmer Rouge, whose radical policies while in power from 1975 to 1979 left an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians dead.