Convicted Khmer Rouge Commander Dies

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Sam Bith, a former Khmer Rouge guerrilla commander serving a life sentence for masterminding the abduction and murder of three Western tourists in 1994, died Friday, a government spokesman said. He was 74 years old.

Sam Bith was sentenced to life in prison in December 2002 after being found guilty of conspiring to kill Australian David Wilson, Briton Mark Slater and Frenchman Jean-Michel Braquet, all tourists, in 1994.

Information Minister Khieu Kanharith announced that Sam Bith died at 9:30 p.m., without disclosing a cause of death. Sam Bith's wife, Khem Ri, said he had been "very sick" with diabetes and high blood pressure and had been hospitalized 10 days earlier.

Sam Bith had served as a Khmer Rouge commander in southwestern Cambodia, where a train carrying the three foreign backpackers was ambushed on July 26, 1994.

About a dozen Cambodians were also killed and many others injured in the armed attack by Khmer Rouge rebels at Phnom Voar, or Vine Mountain, 62 miles southwest of Phnom Penh.

The rebels held Wilson, Slater and Braquet under miserable conditions and killed them three months after the attack when protracted government negotiations for their release failed.

Two other former Khmer Rouge field commanders — Nuon Paet and Chhouk Rin — are serving life sentences for their involvement in the murders.

The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975-79, implementing radical communist policies that led to the death of some 1.7 million people through starvation, disease, overwork and execution.

After being ousted from power, Khmer Rouge leaders fled into the jungle to fight a guerrilla war until the late 1990s, when they defected to the government en masse.

By the late 1990s the guerrilla group had become undisciplined, and many commanders acted like local warlords or bandit leaders.

Sam Bith defected from the Khmer Rouge to join the government in 1997 and received a general's rank in the Cambodian army, but he was arrested in May 2002 after being implicated by another former Khmer Rouge official in the killings.

In convicting him in 2002, a judge said Sam Bith had given an order to his subordinates on Sept. 28, 1994, to kill the foreigners.

Sam Bith had pleaded innocent and claimed in court he had already been relieved of his position as a regional commander by Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot weeks before the train ambush. Pol Pot died in 1998, just before the communist group collapsed in 1999.