The man known as “Brother Number Two”, chief executioner and second in command of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, was arrested and charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes at a UN-sponsored tribunal today.

Nuon Chea, the most senior of the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, whose regime caused the deaths of close to two million people, had for the past few years lived in a simple hut on the edge of the jungle.

But at dawn today a dozen police and court officials raided the wooden house in the town of Pailin, close to the Thai border, where Nuon Chea, a sick, shaking old man of 82, had been living with his elderly wife.

After two hours - during which he was allowed to eat a breakfast of rice and was helped into his clothes by police officers - he was taken by car and helicopter for questioning in the capital, Phnom Penh.

“He was shaking,” his neighbour, Sok Sothera, told Agence France Presse after watching the scene through one of the windows of Nuon Chea’s house. “His legs looked like they would collapse. Two policemen had to hold him up.” The police also searched the house, taking with them letters and documents.

The whereabouts of Nuon Chea, right-hand man to the Khmer Rouge’s head, the late Pol Pot, had been known since he emerged from the jungle at the end of Cambodia’s civil war in 1998. But it has taken all this time for the UN and the Cambodian Government to organise a court, agree on its procedures, appoint lawyers and draw up indictments.

Many Cambodians had resigned themselves to the likelihood that the most senior leaders responsible for the genocide would die of old age before they could be brought to justice. But this year, the slow grinding wheels of Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, to give the tribunal its official name, have begun to revolve more quickly.

In July, the court filed an indictment against Kang Kek Ieu, 64 – better known as Comrade Duch – the former commander of the notorious S-21 prison in the Tuol Sleng district of Phnom Penh, where as many as 16,000 people were tortured before being clubbed to death with axe handles.

Today a spokesman for the court said it had charged Nuon Chea: “The co-investigating judges charged him with crimes against humanity and also with war crimes."

The court has indicted three other individuals, apart from Nuon Chea, so far unnamed. They are believed to include the Khmer Rouge Government’s official head of state, Khieu Samphan, and its Foreign Minister, Ieng Sary.

Nuon Chea was trained as a lawyer in Thailand before becoming involved in communist politics, and became the Khmer Rouge chief ideologist. Duch, who has since become a Christian, has told journalists that principal responsibility for executions lay not with “Brother Number One” - Pol Pot, who died in 1998 - but Nuon Chea. Prosecutors in the genocide tribunal are reported to have documents in which he gave specific orders for political killings.

“I was not involved in the killing of people,” he said in an interview this year. He told an earlier interviewer: “I will be happy to explain before the court. I have a responsibility, not for killing, but for not being able to protect my people.”

After his arrest yesterday, his son, Nuon Say, said: “My father is happy to shed light on the Khmer Rouge regime for the world and people to understand.”

After its overthrow of the corrupt Lon Nol regime in 1975, the Khmer Rouge imposed on Cambodia an agrarian revolution, a utopian project to abolish wealth, class, privilege and even family life by returning the urban population to the rice fields. Millions of people were driven from the cities and forced to work on collective farms.

Families were broken up, and strangers forced to marry one another; children were brought up in collective nurseries without contact with their parents. Those deemed to be enemies of the regime, including many former Khmer Rouge cadres themselves, were brutally executed after sessions of torture and self-incrimination at prisons such as S-21.

In 1979, the Khmer Rouge was driven from power by the Vietnamese Government, and it was not until the end of the civil war in 1998 that any attention was given to seeking justice for the 200,000 people believed to have been executed, and the 1.5 million or more who died of hunger, disease and ill treatment in the giant labour camp which Cambodia became.

The idea of a tribunal has faced opposition from the new generation of Cambodian politicians – the country’s current president, Hun Sen, for example, was a former Khmer Rouge cadre who defected. There have been disagreements about the composition of the court, and of the role of the two foreign judges who will sit alongside the three Cambodians without the presence of a jury.

His neighbour, Sok Sothera, said that she was glad for Nuon Chea’s arrest, but that he was a “kind man”. “Since I moved here a year ago, he sometimes gave food to my children,” she said.

Times Recommends

• No apology for Germany’s own Nazi victims
• Intricate web of fear and hope tying down deal
• Victims remembered a year after Mumbai attacks