Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary and his wife Ieng Thirith were arrested Monday, bringing to four the number of regime leaders now facing Cambodia's UN-backed genocide court.
The elderly couple, who were seized at their villa in the capital Phnom Penh, will face charges of crimes against humanity. Ieng Sary will face additional war crimes charges, officials said.
They are among five former top cadres currently under investigation for their role in crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge's 1975-79 rule over Cambodia, as efforts intensify to bring ageing regime figures to justice.
"Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith have been arrested in execution of an arrest warrant, delivered by the co-investigating judges," said tribunal official Peter Foster.
Ieng Sary emerged as the public face of the secretive Khmer Rouge, while his wife became the murderous regime's social affairs minister and continued to defend its policies long after its demise.
Up to two million people died of starvation and overwork, or were executed, under the Khmer Rouge, which abolished religion, schools and currency, and exiled millions to vast farms in its bid to forge an agrarian utopia.
Regime leader Pol Pot died in 1998, but his deputy Nuon Chea and Duch, who oversaw the notorious Tuol Sleng torture centre, were arrested by the tribunal earlier this year on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The fifth suspect under investigation has not been named, but some believe it is Khieu Samphan, 76, who served as head of state.
The court got under way last year after a decade of often tense negotiations between the UN and Cambodian government.
Trials are expected in 2008 amid concern that some of the ageing defendants could die before ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.
Prime Minister Hun Sen used the arrests Monday as a chance to lash out at international sanctions imposed during the 1980s on Cambodia's government, which was fighting the Khmer Rouge at the time.
"When we toppled Pol Pot, they blamed us. They sanctioned us cruelly and brought Pol Pot to sit in the United Nations," said the premier, himself a former Khmer Rouge commander who fled to Vietnam in 1977.
Hun Sen returned with an army of other defectors and Vietnamese troops a year later to help overthrow the regime.
"Now the international community is bringing (the Khmer Rouge) to be prosecuted ... if we had not toppled Pol Pot, today would not have existed," he said in a speech broadcast on national radio.
Early Monday, police sealed off the roads leading to the home in a quiet Phnom Penh neighbourhood where Ieng Sary has lived with his wife since defecting to the government.
