A FORMER Khmer Rouge leader, who was known as the Butcher, has died in hospital before he could stand trial for his role in the murder of nearly two million Cambodians.

The death of Ta Mok has deprived the forthcoming UN-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal of one of only two likely defendants and further undermined the credibility of a legal process criticised for being too slow.

Ta Mok, 80, insisted until the end that he was a simple one-legged soldier. He blamed the deaths on Pol Pot, the Maoist party’s Brother Number One, who he claimed had been a Vietnamese agent.

However, Ta Mok’s reputation as one of the most brutal of all the Khmer Rouge killers earned him his nickname. After the party took power Ta Mok became a key lieutenant of Pol Pot and a hardline ideologue. Historians of the regime’s rule, between 1975 and 1979, believe that he was a key architect of the mass-murder programme that wiped out about a third of the country’s population in the “ killing fields” and through mass starvation. Troops that he commanded were blamed for the murders of 30,000 people near Phnom Penh, the capital, and an extermination campaign waged against the Khmer Krom, an ethnic group.

Ta Mok died in hospital on Thursday after being admitted last month with breathing problems. He was born into a well-off farming family in 1926 and was the only Khmer Rouge leader to reject surrender deals and fight on until the bitter end. He overthrew and imprisoned Pol Pot shortly before the former leader’s death in 1998 and led a brutal guerrilla campaign from the mountains along the Thai border.

In 1999 he was captured and imprisoned in a military jail. He had claimed to be looking forward to the trial as a chance to clear his name.

“We are very sorry that [Ta Mok] could not live long enough to stand trial and to tell the people the truth about the killing under the Khmer Rouge regime,” Ven Dara, his niece, said. His family said that his body would receive a Buddhist burial in his former stronghold of Anlong Veng, where they said that he was loved. His death raises fears that other surviving leaders, also mostly in their seventies and eighties, will die before they face justice.

Kek Galabru, of Licadho, the Cambodian human rights group, said: “If this tribunal takes too long, one by one they [Khmer Rouge cadres] will die, and the dead cannot talk.”

Youk Chhang, the director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, said that the death could damage the credibility of the trials. He said: “We have been listening to the victims for 28 years now . . . investigators really need to move.”

Ta Mok’s death leaves only Duch, a teacher who became director of the Tuol Sleng torture centre, in custody on genocide charges. He has now become a born-again Christian.

After the formal opening of the trial this month there were reports that witnesses had disappeared.

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