Cambodia denies Pol Pot 'escape'

(First Edition)

PHNOM PENH , Cambodia (AP) The Cambodian Co-Premier, joint leader, Norodom Ranariddh, backtracked Wednesday yesterday on his charge claim that infamous the Khmer Rouge guerrilla leader, Pol Pot, escaped into Thailand after government forces captured the guerrillas' stronghold.

The guerrilla base at Pailin fell to government troops on 19 March, 19, sending a wave of some 25,000 refugees into nearby Thailand. Most or all are believed to have been repatriated by the Thais. Prince Ranariddh had told reporters on Tuesday he had photographs showing the government attack on Pol Pot's house and his escape in a convoy of trucks. He said photographs showed Pol Pot and some of his followers on a road inside Thailand, but he did not show any photographs to the reporters.

He said Wednesday, yesterday, however, that he was referring to 'Pol Potists' a term used to describe the Khmer Rouge group rather than the guerrilla leader himself, who leads a clandestine existence.

'I told them I had pictures of Pol Potists, convoys of trucks and cars loaded with Pol Potists not Mr Pol Pot and that the road where the trucks were seen had the lines marked in the middle, and that in the Pailin area we don't have such roads,' Prince Ranariddh said on government radio.

A Thai military spokesman denied Wednesday yesterday that Thailand helped evacuate any Khmer Rouge. He said the only Thai trucks in the area without Phnom Penh's permission had been there to repatriate Cambodians displaced by the recent fighting.

Thai officers along the Thai-Cambodian frontier said last week that Thai authorities did not provide refuge to Marxist Khmer Rouge guerrillas in the wake of the fighting, allowing only civilians to enter Thai territory.

A Khmer Rouge official at the group's office in Phnom Penh, meanwhile, expressed displeasure over Ranariddh's original remarks about Pol Pot's alleged escape.

"He has no power now, so why do they continue to make problems for him?" the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

He said Pol Pot had given up leadership of the Khmer Rouge when it officially dissolved itself as a communist party in 1981, and had resigned as chief commander of its army in 1985.

Pol Pot directed a reign of terror in the mid-1970s before being driven into the jungles along the Thai-Cambodian border by a Vietnamese invasion force in late 1978.

The Khmer Rouge and two non-communist groups then waged a war against the Vietnamese-backed Phnom Penh government. The civil war formally ended with a UN-brokered peace accord in 1991. But the Khmer Rouge boycotted last year's general elections and continue to fight the new government.

Phnom Penh has repeatedly charged that elements of the Thai military still aid the Khmer Rouge despite assertions by the Thai government that it has cut its former links with the guerrillas.

Thai businessmen have engaged in a mutually lucrative trade with the Khmer Rouge in gems and logs. The center of that trade was Pailin.