Photojournalist helped expose horrors of Cambodia

March 31, 2008 at 5:00AM
New York Times photographer Dith Pran has died. Pran was 65.
New York Times photographer Dith Pran has died. Pran was 65. (Associated Press/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Photojournalist Dith Pran risked his life to help New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg tell the world about Cambodia's fall to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, then became a prisoner of the barbarous regime, under which as many as 2 million Cambodians were killed. Through guile and sheer desperation, Dith survived for more than four years before escaping through what he famously dubbed "the killing fields" -- horrifying clusters of corpses that littered the countryside. His story inspired a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people's rights. He died Sunday in New Jersey of pancreatic cancer. He was 65.

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