PHNOM PENH, 20 September 2007 — The Khmer Rouge’s most senior surviving leader Nuon Chea was formally charged yesterday with war crimes and crimes against humanity, a spokesman for Cambodia’s UN-backed genocide tribunal said.

“The coinvestigating judges charged him with crimes against humanity and also with war crimes,” spokesman Reach Sambath told AFP, adding that he had been placed in the tribunal’s custody pending further investigation.

Nuon Chea, now 82 and once the most trusted lieutenant of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, is the first of a small group of former top cadres living freely in Cambodia to be arrested by the new UN-backed tribunal.

Earlier in the day, police and court officials arrested him at his home in the remote northwest and drove him to a waiting helicopter, an AFP correspondent at the scene witnessed.

He was then brought to the capital Phnom Penh to await justice in Cambodia’s long-delayed genocide trials.

Nuon Chea, known in the regime’s revolutionary circles as “Brother Number Two,” was allegedly a key architect of the execution policies of the Khmer Rouge, who are blamed for the deaths of up to two million people.

But in an interview with AFP in July, he insisted he had no blood on his hands.

“I was not involved in the killing of people,” he said. “I don’t know who was responsible.” After officials from the genocide court swept in at dawn to seize him, Nuon Chea’s son, Nuon Say, told AFP: “He was prepared for a long time for this. Everybody knew this day was coming.”

“We are not happy because he struggled for the nation, but at the end of his life he will be found guilty” for crimes committed by the regime, he added.

Nuon Say said authorities had confiscated documents, as well as some handwritten correspondence and photos of Nuon Chea and his wife.

Hundreds of villagers gathered in stunned silence as a convoy of nearly a dozen police and court vehicles escorted him to the helicopter.

“He was shaking. His legs looked like they would collapse,” neighbor Sok Sothera, who peered in through the window before he was led away, told AFP.

Nuon Chea’s rank in the communist hierarchy and alleged decision-making role would make him the most significant defendant to be tried by the tribunal, which was established last year, for crimes committed under the 1975-79 regime.