Duch has confessed to committing multiple atrocities when he was head of Tuol Sleng prison [EPA]

Kaing Khek Lev, better known as Duch, is the first of five Khmer Rouge leaders to be charged in connection with the deaths of an estimated two million people.
 
After a closed-door hearing before the joint Cambodian-United Nations tribunal in the capital, Phnom Penh, the former schoolteacher and now born-again Christian was taken into provisional custody of the court.
 
The international panel, called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, was set up to investigate crimes committed during Pol Pot's reign.
 
Last month prosecutors recommended to the tribunal that five former Khmer Rouge leaders stand trial on charges of "crimes against humanity, genocide, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, homicide, torture and religious persecution".

Duch, 65, unlike other former Khmer Rouge leaders, has been in a military prison since May 1999.
 
He has confessed to committing multiple atrocities when he was head of the capital's notorious Tuol Sleng, or S-21 prison.

He is expected to be a key witness in the trial of the other Khmer Rouge leaders.
 
The Khmer Rouge used Tuol Sleng to torture suspected enemies before taking them out to the infamous "killing fields" near the city to be shot.
 
Some two million Cambodians are estimated to have died of hunger, disease, overwork and execution during the Khmer Rouge's reign.
 
Survivors
 
And at least 14,000 people were imprisoned at what is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
 
Fewer than a dozen are believed to have lived to tell the tale.
 
One of them, Chum Mey, was happy to hear that the former prison chief was being questioned.
 
"I want to confront him to ask who gave him the orders to kill the Cambodian people,'' the 77-year-old said on Tuesday.
 
"I want to hear how he will answer before the court, or if he will just blame everything on the ghosts of Pol Pot and Ta Mok."
 
Ta Mok, Pol Pot's former military chief, died in 2006. Pol Pot died in 1998.
 
Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge's chief ideologue, Leng Sary, the former foreign minister; and Khieu Samphan, the former head of state, are alive but in declining health.

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