Life in prison urged for 'Comrade Duch'

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- A war crimes court in Cambodia should impose a 40-year jail sentence on "Comrade Duch," the former Khmer Rouge prison chief, a prosecutor says.

Bill Smith told the United Nations-backed tribunal that Duch, 67, must be held accountable for his "unrelenting brutality," the BBC reported Wednesday.

"The sentence to be imposed by this trial chamber should be 40 years' imprisonment," Smith told the court.

As many as 17,000 inmates are thought to have passed through the gates of Duch's Tuol Sleng prison where they were tortured and killed at the height of Pol Pot's regime in the 1970s.

Duch encouraged the jail's interrogation teams to apply torture techniques that included cutting off prisoners' fingers and toes and forcing them to eat their own excrement, The Times of London reports.

Duch, whose real name is Kang Kek leu, is the first of five leading Khmer Rouge figures to be tried and the only former member of Pol Pot's inner circle to admit his guilt.