Pol Pot Cremated in Simple Ceremony

The body of former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, one of the century’s most reviled dictators, was cremated today by his comrades in a simple ceremony.

A Khmer Rouge spokesman told Reuters that the architect of Cambodia’s 1975-79 “killing fields” regime was cremated just opposite a hut where his body was displayed to the press on Thursday. Journalists were not allowed to attend the cremation.

A five-member Thai military team on Friday took fingerprints, clipped hair samples and photographed the teeth of Pol Pot in an effort to allay lingering suspicions that his death might be a hoax.

The military officials said they were satisfied that the body laid out on a wooden slab in the steamy Cambodian jungle hut was that of Pol Pot, and they said no autopsy or further tests were needed.

Reports that he had died of a heart attack drew some suspicion, but the onetime right-hand man of Pol Pot insisted that he was not assassinated.

“It’s like this, nobody killed or poisoned Pol Pot,” Khmer Rouge commander Ta Mok told Associated Press Television on Friday. “Now he is finished. He has no power and no rights any longer. He is nothing more than cow dung. Actually, cow dung is more useful because it can be used as fertilizer.”

Ta Mok, a one-legged guerrilla dubbed “The Butcher” for his brutality, deposed Pol Pot as the head of the Khmer Rouge movement last year and placed him under house arrest.

Pol Pot’s widow, who spoke to reporters near where her husband’s body lay before its cremation, praised him as a “good man.”