Death of Pol Pot lieutenant questioned

Death of Pol Pot lieutenant questioned

CAMBODIA: The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DCCAM) expressed fresh suspicion on Monday over the death of Pol Pot's lieutenant Son Sen, the Khmer Rouge minister of defense, raising new doubts of his whereabouts.

"I do not think Son Sen is dead yet," the director of the DCCAM, Youk Chhang, told a roundtable discussion organized by Cambodian journalists on Monday. "I am wondering where he is now."

Son Sen was defense minister in the brutal 1975 to 1979 Khmer Rouge regime, blamed for the death of some 1.7 million Cambodians.

Son Sen, his wife Yun Yat and other family members were reportedly shot dead on Pol Pot's orders in early 1997 in a jungle near the Cambodian-Thai border.

But Youk Chhang said that Son Sen's death could have been fabricated, and that he may now be living outside Cambodia, because photographs taken soon after his death did not match earlier ones. --AFP