Monday, August 10, 2009
By Sopheng Cheang
Canadian Press

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — A former Khmer Rouge prison guard told a court Monday he was taken to Cambodia's notorious Killing Fields one afternoon 30 years ago and ordered to dump corpses into a mass grave.

Chhun Phal, 47, said he did not count how many dead bodies he handled, but it took him and 11 other guards two hours to dispose of them.

"I was asked to bury the bodies," he said softly. "I managed to only fill one pit with dead bodies."

The guards then dug two more pits to add to the hundreds of mass graves at Choeung Ek, more commonly known as the Killing Fields, on the outskirts of the capital, Phnom Penh, where thousands of the Khmer Rouge's victims were killed and their bodies dumped.