Khmer Rouge verdict: 'I live next to my torturer'

After 12 years in operation, the UN-backed Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia on Friday delivered what will likely be its final verdict. But away from the courtroom, some survivors of one of the 20th Century's greatest horrors are ambivalent about the tribunal's legacy, reports George Wright from Phnom Penh.
Like many 60-year-old men in rural Cambodia, Srei Than can often be found relaxing and drinking beer with friends outside his home. But when he locks eyes with Soy Sen, who lives a short motorcycle ride away down a dusty lane, he quickly looks away.
"Whenever I see him, he walks away," Sen says.
There's good reason for this.
In 1974, when Sen was just 14, Khmer Rouge guerrillas took control of his hometown in Takeo province, to the south of the capital Phnom Penh. It was a year before they would topple the US-backed government and unleash a four-year reign of terror across the country.

Sen was sent to Kraing Ta Chan prison by the radical communists. He believes it was down to his father being a local official in the district they had just captured.
Upon entering the prison, Sen quickly realised the horrors that were unfolding there, including murder, torture and cannibalism.
"I was climbing a palm tree in the afternoon and from the top I could see two children being taken away," Sen told the tribunal in 2015.
"They usually waited for me to bring down the palm juice, but that day I heard… the sound of the cracking of children against a palm tree."
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One of the most brutal guards at the prison was Than, better known by his alias "Small Duch". His namesake, a man known as Duch, ran the infamous Toul Sleng torture prison in Phnom Penh and was sentenced to life by the tribunal in 2012.
He recalls an event that has stuck in his mind ever since. One day, Sen says, Than ordered him to clear up an area after he had just committed a horrific attack on two female inmates.
"He was so cruel... he tortured me," Sen said on Friday. "One day he raped two women with an M-79 missile by putting it inside them."