A former leader in Cambodia’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime was freed after a war crimes tribunal found that she was unfit to stand trial, the court said on Sunday.
Ieng Thirith, 80, the social affairs minister is believed to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
She is accused of being a key figure in the communist Khmer Rouge which ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 and is estimated to have killed as many as two million of the country’s eight million people via extreme social planning that led to genocide and mass famine.
The court handed down the decision on Ieng on Friday after it was determined that she suffered from an illness and she is “currently mentally unfit to stand trial for crimes against humanity alleged to have been committed,” citing her “cognitive impairment.”
Ieng was released unconditionally; on the same day, the prosecutors appealed the court’s decision, requesting her release be conditional in case there is an opportunity to try her in the future.
Under the Khmer Rouge, leader Pol Pot attempted to create a kind of Maoist utopia that ultimately morphed into a genocide that targeted anyone deemed subversive.
The regime cut off ties to all other countries and closed hospitals, schools, and factories. It also abolished banking and the use of currency, outlawed all religions, and relocated citizens from urban areas to collective farms, where they were forced to work long hours and many starved to death or died due to exhaustion.
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