Duch fails to ID Westerners imprisoned in S-21

The above photographs, of two unidentified men, were found with a cache of recently donated photographs of S-21 prison victims. Photograph: Documentation Center of Cambodia

As part of an ongoing search to confirm the identities of two Westerners whose faces emerged in a recent anonymous donation of photos featuring inmates from the notorious S-21 prison, researchers yesterday turned to a man they believed might have special insight into the duo’s fate – their jailer.

Sitting in a small room outside his detention cell at the Khmer Rouge tribunal, where he is currently serving a life sentence for his crimes as the former chairman of the Phnom Penh detention and interrogation centre, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, briefly studied the faces of the men, put them aside and began to talk.

There would be, however, no great revelations.

“He said there were only four Western prisoners at S-21, and he didn’t really remember the faces of those people,” the Documentation Center of Cambodia’s Savina Sirik told the Post. Sirik, and her colleague Kok-Thay Eng, interviewed Duch for two hours yesterday to try and solve the mystery of the two mens’ identities. 

Sirik, who heads up the Living Documents Project at DC-Cam, said Duch could not remember details about many of the photos they brought, which weren’t limited to the two unidentified men.

Pictures included one of a church that Duch may have attended, and a photo of a man whose son had recently asked DC-Cam about the circumstances of his father’s death under the Khmer Rouge. 

They also presented an S-21 photo of a man named Andre Gaston Courtigne, a former employee of the French Embassy in Phnom Penh, on the off chance that he might be one of the two unidentified men. Duch could not say.

A spokesman for the French Embassy said yesterday that an investigation about Courtigne is ongoing, but there was no new information.

Wearing eyeglasses, a collared white shirt tucked into slacks, and loafers over white socks, Duch was dressed more like the mathematics teacher he once was than a man convicted of crimes against humanity. 

The interview, said Sirik, was at times tense and uncomfortable.

“At times he laughed at me, like when I asked him certain questions, he just burst into laughter, and I didn’t really understand what his laughter meant,” she said.