Once a former high school in Phnom Penh, this building was used as the notorious Security Prison 21 (S-21) by the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to its fall in 1979. Four months after the Khmer Rouge captured the city and won the civil war they turned the school into a prison and interrogation centre. They renamed the complex "Security Prison 21" (S-21).
The classrooms were converted into tiny prisons and torture chambers, and all windows were covered with iron bars and barbed wire to prevent escapes. Buildings were enclosed in electrified barbed wire.
Upon arrival at the prison, prisoners were photographed and required to give detailed biographies, beginning with their childhood and ending with their arrest. After that, they were forced to strip to their underwear, and their possessions were confiscated. The prisoners were then taken to their cells. Most prisoners at S-21 were held there for two to three months. Within two or three days after they were brought to S-21, all prisoners were taken for interrogation.
Methods for generating confessions included pulling out fingernails while pouring alcohol on the wounds, holding prisoners’ heads under water, and the use of the waterboarding technique. The torture system at Tuol Sleng was designed to make prisoners confess to whatever crimes they were charged with by their captors. Prisoners were routinely beaten and tortured with electric shocks, searing hot metal instruments and hanging, as well as through the use of various other devices.
The prisoners received four small spoonfuls of rice porridge and watery soup of leaves twice a day. Drinking water without asking the guards for permission resulted in serious beatings. The inmates were hosed down every four days.
For the first year of S-21’s existence, corpses were buried near the prison. However, by the end of 1979, cadres ran out of burial spaces, the prisoner and their family were taken to the Choeung Ek extermination center, fifteen kilometers from Phnom Penh.
Females were sometimes raped by the interrogators, even though sexual abuse was against DK policy. The perpetrators who were found out were executed.
Those who were held in the large mass cells were collectively shackled to long pieces of iron bar. The shackles were fixed to alternating bars; the prisoners slept with their heads in opposite directions. They slept on the floor without mats, mosquito nets, or blankets. They were forbidden to talk to each other. Physical torture was combined with sleep deprivation and deliberate neglect of the prisoners.
The vast majority of prisoners were innocent of the charges against them and their confessions produced by torture.
A number of Western prisoners passed through S-21 between April 1976 and December 1978. Mostly these were picked up at sea by Khmer Rouge patrol boats. They included Vietnamese, Laotians, Indians, Pakistanis, Britons, Americans, New Zealanders and Australians. One of the last prisoners to die was American Michael Scott Deeds, who was captured with his friend Chris De Lance while sailing from Singapore to Hawaii.
The prison had a staff of 1,720 people. Of those, approximately 300 were office staff, internal workforce and interrogators. Several of these workers were children taken from the prisoner families. The other 1,400 were general workers, including people who grew food for the prison.
From 1975 to 1979, an estimated 17,000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng (some estimates suggest a number as high as 20,000, though the real number is unknown).
Prisoners were killed by being battered with iron bars, pickaxes, machetes and many other makeshift weapons.
There were only twelve known survivors.
