"I'm innocent," says Khmer Rouge Brother No. 2

By Ek Madra

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Khmer Rouge Brother Number Two Nuon Chea proclaimed his innocence when he appeared before Cambodia's U.N.-backed "Killing Fields" tribunal on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the court said on Friday.

According to a summary released two days after his indictment, Pol Pot's right-hand man said he bore no responsibility for the 1.7 million people thought to have died. Many were tortured and executed. Others died of starvation, overwork or disease.

During the Khmer Rouge's four years in charge from 1975 to 1979, real power lay in the hands of the ultra-Maoist movement's Military Committee of which he was not a member, Nuon Chea was quoted as saying.

"We did not have any direct contact with the bases and we were not aware of what was happening there," he told the court. He said he had lost 40 relatives during the upheaval.

Nuon Chea's official rank within the Beijing-backed regime was Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, as the Khmer Rouge called Cambodia, a role scholars say put him in charge of party and state security.

This included Phnom Penh's notorious S-21 interrogation and torture centre at the Tuol Sleng high school. More than 14,000 prisoners are known to have entered Tuol Sleng's barbed-wire gates. Around 10 lived to tell the tale.

In a 1999 magazine interview, S-21 chief Duch -- charged with crimes against humanity in July -- said Nuon Chea had given him direct orders to kill 300 soldiers in a party purge in 1978.

"He called to meet me and said, 'Don't bother to interrogate them -- just kill them'. And I did," Duch said.