News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Officials Say No Americans in Tuol Sleng Grave

Date: June 06, 2000

"No Americans Found in Cambodia Grave
Monday, June 5, 2000 - L.A. Times
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia--A mass grave discovered last week near an infamous torture chamber of the Khmer Rouge does not contain any Americans who perished at the prison, a US official said Monday. Forensics experts flown in over the weekend from the US Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii determined that none of the nearly dozen bodies found in the grave are Westerners, US Ambassador Kent Weidemann said. "The anthropologists did a study yesterday that determined the bones were not Caucasian in nature," the ambassador said. The grave, just 100 yards from the Khmer Rouge's Tuol Sleng prison, was uncovered Thursday by a Phnom Penh resident preparing a house extension in his front yard. At least 14,000 persons were imprisoned in Tuol Sleng during the late 1970s rule of the Khmer Rouge, including four American Caucasian civilians seized at sea by the radical revolutionaries. Only a handful of inmates left the prison alive. Tuol Sleng director Kaing Khek Iev, better known as Duch, told a reporter last year he was ordered in the days before the Khmer Rouge's overthrow to kill all the Westerners and burn their remains so they would never be found.

But hope persisted that Americans Michael Scott Deeds and Christopher DeLance might be found, based on testimony from a Tuol Sleng survivor who said he saw a Westerner's body buried near the prison as an invading Vietnamese army reached the capital. Deeds and DeLance were sailing in the Gulf of Thailand in 1978 when their boat was captured by a Khmer Rouge patrol boat. They were brought to the prison and forced into make convoluted but false confessions that they were CIA spies attempting to undermine Cambodia's communist revolution. The names of two other American yachtsmen captured in 1978, James Clark and Lance McNamara, are among the 11 Westerners found in Tuol Sleng's prison records. Although the four were civilians, they are included on a list of about 70 Americans who were lost in Cambodia during the US war against communism in Southeast Asia. The remains of two American soldiers killed during the last battle of the Vietnam War era, fought on the Cambodia's Tang Island, were identified by the Hawaii lab earlier this year."