Khmer Rouge tribunal hearings continued Thursday, as a witness described the Kraing Tachan security center in Takeo province as “the most devastating killing place.”
More than 1,500 people were killed at the center under the Khmer Rouge.
The witness, Meas Sokha, who survived the prison, spoke to the UN-backed court for a second day, in the atrocity crimes trial of former Khmer Rouge leaders Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan.
On Wednesday, Meas Sokha, 54, described to the court losing his entire family to malnutrition and then being detained at the security center, where he saw mass executions, up to 100 people in one day, and where Khmer Rouge cadre would drink the gall bladder bile of people they interrogated, before killing them.
On Thursday, he described more atrocities.
“They killed people without discrimination,” he told the court. He had witnessed Khmer Rouge soldiers killing babies by hitting them against tree trunks, after killing their mothers, he said. The Khmer Rouge policy, he said, was “to dig out a weed, dig out all the roots.”
