Khmer Rouge prison chief denies waterboarding

PHNOM PENH (AFP) — The former Khmer Rouge prison chief on Wednesday denied he waterboarded or suffocated detainees as he detailed his torture techniques to Cambodia's UN-backed war crimes trial.

Duch -- whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav -- apologised at the start of his trial last month for overseeing the torture and extermination of 15,000 people who passed through the regime's Tuol Sleng prison, also known as S-21.

But he said he had not used the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding, and had not put plastic bags over prisoners' heads because of the danger they could suffocate to death.

"The kind of waterboarding technique was not employed and the plastic bag was also not a kind of technique," Duch said.

Duch said he discussed interrogation tactics with Khmer Rouge cadres soon after he began working at the prison.

"There were two techniques. The normal beating technique and the electrocution technique with use of a telephone (line)... which was connected to an electric current to electrocute prisoners. That was true," Duch said.

The United States has been heavily criticised for using waterboarding to interrogate suspected Al-Qaeda prisoners, with many commentators citing it as a brutal method of the Khmer Rouge.

Duch told the court that he picked children as young as 12 years old to work as special security guards at S-21 because they were easy to train.

"I regarded those children as a clean piece of paper on which we could draw anything, write anything with communist political tendency," Duch said.

Besides Vietnamese prisoners of war and Cambodians being purged from the Khmer Rouge, Duch said an American, a Briton, an Australian and a New Zealander were also tortured and executed at S-21 on suspicion of espionage.

Duch is charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture and premeditated murder over the extermination of thousands of people between 1975 and 1979 at Tuol Sleng and the nearby "Killing Fields."

However, he has denied prosecutors' claims that he played a central role in the Khmer Rouge's iron-fisted rule, and maintains he only tortured two people himself and never personally executed anyone.

"The people who were detained had to be smashed. Everyone who was arrested and sent to S-21 was presumed dead already," Duch told the court Wednesday.

"S-21 dared not to release anyone, otherwise we would be beheaded," he said, adding that even those mistakenly arrested could never be let out of the prison.

Duch faces life in jail at the court, which does not have the power to impose the death penalty.

Many believe the UN-sponsored tribunal is the last chance to find justice for victims of the regime, which killed up to two million people through starvation, overwork, torture and execution.

The Khmer Rouge were ousted in 1979 by Hanoi-backed forces who discovered Tuol Sleng and established the facility as a museum to display the regime's crimes.

The tribunal was formed in 2006 after nearly a decade of wrangling between the United Nations and Cambodian government, and is scheduled to try four other senior Khmer Rouge leaders.

But the court has been marred by corruption claims and talks between UN and Cambodian officials ended earlier this month without agreement on anti-graft measures.