page_title: Bou Meng
section_title: Torture
hierarchical_section_title: Bou Meng / Torture
caption_attribution_description: Bou Meng after having received a copy of the Duch-verdict on 12 Aug 2010. He is one of only a handful survivors from the secret Khmer Rouge prison S21 where at least 12,273 people were tortured and executed. ECCC Public Affairs Section has started the job of distributing 10,000 copies of the Duch-verdict (450 pages) and 17,000 copies of the summary (36 pages). These documents will available in all 1,621 communes in Cambodia as well as in libraries, schools and other public institutions. Kaing Guek Eav alias Duch was found guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes and sentenced to 35 years of imprisonment on 26 July 2010. He is the first person to stand trial before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, more commonly referred to as the Khmer Rouge tribunal. Fore more information: &lt;a href="http://www.eccc.gov.kh" rel="nofollow"&gt;www.eccc.gov.kh&lt;/a&gt;
context_page_description: Bou Meng is one of only seven known adult survivors of the Khmer Rouge imprisonment in the S-21 Tuol Sleng camp, where 20,000 Cambodians were tortured and executed. He was arrested with his wife, Ma Yoeun, in 1976 and taken into S-21; they never met again after then. Bou Meng was tortured for weeks, with many kinds of torture devices and he had to fabricate confessions. He was spared from being slaughtered only because he was a highly skilled painter. His wife, according to the records of Tuol Sleng camp, was tortured and killed on August 16, 1977. His children ended up in a children's center and eventually they starved to death.
  In 2002, he was believed to be dead. In January 2002, Cambodian newspaper Phnom Penh Post wrote that he had died in the 1990s, while Cambodian magazine Searching for the truth wrote that he had "disappeared". When Bou Meng found out that people thought that he was dead, he went back to S-21.
context_section_description: Bou Meng was interrogated and tortured for weeks with electric shock, bamboo sticks whips, by poking his wounds and so on. Bou Meng once recalled that "they tortured me like an animal" and "my life was so miserable". Bou Meng always answered that he was innocent and that he had done nothing wrong, but the guards kept torturing him and asking him where he had met the CIA, KGB and "Yuon land swallowers" (i.e. the Vietnamese). Bou Meng didn't even know what CIA and KGB were. He finally fabricated confessions, hoping that they would stop torturing him. He said that he had joined the CIA at the pagoda with the monks and that he was asked to join the CIA by a pagoda boy. The guards also asked him about the CIA networks in the jungle, and he had to provide the names of 20 people he had met in that period.
caption: Bou Meng holding a copy of the "Duch" verdict
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