⁍ Kaing Guek Eav or ‘Comrade Duch’ was the first member of the Khmer Rouge leadership to face trial for his role within the regime.

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⁍ In 2010, a U.N. tribunal found him guilty of mass murder, torture and crimes against humanity at Tuol Sleng prison.

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⁍ Duch – by the time of his trial a born-again Christian – expressed regret for his crimes.

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– The commander of Cambodia’s infamous Tuol Sleng prison, where at least 14,000 people were murdered between 1975 and 1979, has died. Kaing Guek Eav, or “Comrade Duch,” was the first member of the Khmer Rouge leadership to face trial for his role in the deaths of at least 1.7 million people, reports Reuters. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2010 by a UN-backed tribunal, two years after he was found guilty of crimes against humanity including mass murder, torture, and crimes against humanity against humanity at Tuol Sleng prison, the former Phnom Penh high school which still stands as a memorial to the atrocities committed inside. “Not until you walk through the empty corridors of Tuol Sleng does Stalin’s idiom that one death is a tragedy—a million a statistic, take on a terrifying potency,” wrote author Nic Dunlop in his 1999 book The Lost Executioner. “At S-21, new prisoners had their mugshots taken. Hundreds are now on display within its crumbling walls. Nothing in the former schoolhouse took place without Duch’s approval. His control was total.”