Top Khmer Rouge leader charged with war crimes

0 Comments | AFP, September, 2007

PHNOM PENH (AFP) — The Khmer Rouge's most senior surviving leader Nuon Chea was formally charged Wednesday with war crimes and crimes against humanity, a spokesman for Cambodia's UN-backed genocide tribunal said.

"The co-investigating judges charged him with crimes against humanity and also with war crimes," spokesman Reach Sambath told AFP, adding that he had been placed in the tribunal's custody pending further investigation.

Nuon Chea, now 82 and once the most trusted lieutenant of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, is the first of a small group of former top cadres living freely in Cambodia to be arrested by the new UN-backed tribunal.

Earlier in the day, police and court officials arrested him at his home in the remote northwest and drove him to a waiting...