Khmer Rouge jailer faces 19 years for 16,000 dead

"You have to bear in mind that victims are very deeply hurt and traumatized," she added. "We can never give them what they lost ... so a sentence can only ever be symbolic in a way."

The prosecution and defense have one month to appeal.

Unlike the other defendants, Duch (pronounced DOIK) has several times asked for forgiveness, even offering at one point to face a public stoning. But his surprise request on the final day of the trial to be acquitted and freed left many wondering if his contrition was sincere.

"He tricked everybody," said Chum Mey, 79, one of just a few people sent to Tuol Sleng prison -- code-named S-21 -- who survived. The key witness wiped his eyes. "See ... my tears drop down again. I feel like I was victim during the Khmer Rouge, and now I'm a victim once again."

Duch, sitting rigidly in a crisp light purple shirt and starring into the distance, showed no emotion as he listened Monday to the judge talk about the court's findings.

Judges noted that the jailer was often present during interrogations at Tuol Sleng and signed off on all the tortures and executions, sometimes taking part himself. He said the court had rejected arguments that he was acting on orders from the top because he was under duress or feared for his own life.

"In carrying out his functions, he showed a high degree of efficiency and zeal," the judges wrote. "He worked tirelessly to ensure that S-21 ran as efficiently as possible and did so out of unquestioning loyalty to his superiors."

A former math teacher, Duch joined Pol Pot's movement in 1967, three years before the U.S. started carpet-bombing Cambodia to try to wipe out Northern Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong inside the border. By 1976, he was the trusted head of its ultimate killing machine, S-21.

After a Vietnamese invasion forced the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, Duch disappeared for almost two decades, living under various aliases in northwestern Cambodia, where he had converted to Christianity. His chance discovery by a British journalist led to his arrest just over a decade ago.

Though the tribunal has been credited with helping the traumatized nation speak out publicly for the first time about atrocities committed three decades ago, it has been criticized as well.

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