Former Khmer Rouge commander charged with backpackers' murder

A former commander of the Khmer Rouge was charged yesterday with the murder of three Western tourists who were kidnapped from a train in southern Cambodia eight years ago.

Sam Bith, who was arrested on Wednesday after more than two years as a fugitive, was charged with complicity in the killings of Mark Slater, from Northamptonshire, and his French and Australian companions, Jean-Michel Braquet and David Wilson. He faces separate charges of illegal detention, damage to public property, robbery, membership of an illegal group and terrorism.

The backpackers were travelling on a train in the southern province of Kampot when it was attacked by Khmer Rouge guerrillas in July 1994. Thirteen Cambodians were killed in the ambush, the three men were held hostage and a £100,000 ransom was demanded for their freedom.

But after two months of negotiations, and a botched attempt by the Cambodian government to deliver the ransom, the hostages were executed on Vine mountain where their bodies were recovered a few months later.

The deaths are said to have been ordered by the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, who died in 1998. The following year a low-ranking commander named Nuon Paet was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the murders.

Sam Bith, who is 69, was Pol Pot's commander in the region in which the men were killed and, during his trial, Nuon Paet insisted that it was he who had given the order for the executions. But after Sam Bith abandoned the Khmer Rouge in 1996, he was rewarded with the rank of major-general and became an adviser to the defence minister.

As political pressure for his arrest mounted, he disappeared. Charges were filed against him in 2000 although he officially remained defence adviser until last year.

The police claimed they were unable to track him down until this week when he turned up in the north-west of Cambodia close to the town of Battambang. He is said to have been running a business selling construction materials.

Some 1.7 million people died from violence, disease, and famine after the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. The regime was driven from power when the Vietnamese army invaded in 1979, but remnants fought on from the jungle until 1998.

In that year, the mysterious Pol Pot, who had not been seen for many years, died, supposedly of illness but possibly at the hands of disaffected commanders. Posthumous photographs showed a pitiful, shrivelled old man. Sam Bith too appears to have been weakened by his many years living in the jungle.

He tottered out of the court yesterday, escorted by police armed with AK-47 assault rifles, before being transferred to Phnom Penh's Prey Sar prison. He declined to comment.