World

Pol Pot Reported Dead

April 15, 1998 / 4:16 PM EDT / AP

Pol Pot, the leader of the radical Khmer Rouge movement whose brutal rule was blamed for the deaths of up to 2 million people, has died, Thai military and rebel sources said Thursday.

There was no confirmation of Pol Pot's death from either the Thai or Cambodian governments.

But a Khmer Rouge guerrilla, who identified himself as an assistant to Gen. Khem Nuon, said the 73-year-old Pol Pot died of heart failure late Wednesday night.

"It's true that he died," said the aide, who did not identify himself. "I was there, I saw it with my eyes."

The Khmer Rouge guerrilla was contacted by telephone near the Thai-Cambodian border, where a hard-line faction is holding out against Cambodian government forces. Khem Nuon is one of the group's senior commanders.

A Thai military officer, contacted by telephone near the Thai-Cambodian border, said Pol Pot died in his sleep late Wednesday near the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng in northern Cambodia. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity.

There have been a number of reports of the ailing leader's death in recent years. In the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, government spokesman Khieu Kanharith said Pol Pot's death could neither be confirmed or denied.

"(If he is dead) we request whoever has his body to turn it over to the government," he said, adding that an autopsy would have to be conducted to determine if the former leader died of natural causes.

"There are a lot of coincidences here," he said.

Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge captured the toppled U.S.-backed Cambodian government in 1975 and began a massive purge of Western influences.

Up to 2 million Cambodians died through mass execution, disease and starvation during the mid-1970s. One person in five died of starvation, overwork, illness or execution.

A 1979 Vietnamese invasion ousted the Khmer Rouge, who retreated to the jungles to fight successive governments.

There have been calls for Pol Pot to be brought before the International Court of Justice in the Hague to stand trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In a bloody internal struggle last year, Pol Pot was overthrown by his former comrades and was forced to face a communist-style "People's Tribunal." He was then put under house arrest.

Since then, the Cambodian government has pushed the rebels out of their stronghold of Anlong Veng into jungles near the Thai border, and has negotiated the defections of many Khmer Rouge rebels.

Pol Pot has never shown regret, or even recognition of the misery he caused.

His "conscience is clear" he told a Western journalist in October 1997. While he acknowledged "mistakes," he suggested he had been the target of a plot to discredit him, perhaps by Cambodia's traditional enemy, Vietnam.