Nuon Chea, who was second in command during the brutal Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia, died Sunday in Phnom Penh at the age of 93, according to a U.N. tribunal which found him guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.
The cause of his death was not disclosed.
He was convicted of crimes against humanity in 2014 and sentenced to life in prison. The tribunal also found him guilty of genocide in a 2018 trial, and he was given another life sentence.
Nuon Chea, known as “Brother Number Two” and “Pol Pot’s shadow,” was behind a policy of mass executions of perceived traitors after the Khmer Rouge army won the Cambodian Civil War in 1975. According to a former Khmer Rouge security chief, it was Nuon Chea, not Khmer Rouge’s leader Pol Pot, who ordered the killings.
It’s estimated that 2 million people died, about a quarter of the country’s population, from executions, famine and being overworked between 1975 and 1979 when the Khmer Rouge was in power.
In the final days of the regime’s rule, Nuon Chea also “ordered me to kill all the remaining prisoners,” the security chief, Kaing Khek Iev, said in 1999.
Nuon Chea expressed little regret for the crimes before his arrest in 2007.
“Believe me, if these traitors were alive, the Khmers as a people would have been finished,” he told a Cambodian journalist. “So I dare to suggest our decision was the correct one. If we had shown mercy to these people, the nation would have been lost.”
