Three decades after the fall of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, the country might finally have a start date for the first trial of one of its most brutal cadres.

Robert Petit, one of two co-prosecutors, said that Kaing Guek Eav, who went by the nom de guerre Duch when he allegedly headed the Tuol Sleng torture centre in Phnom Penh, was likely to go on trial in March but that the other four defendants who are being held, all in their late 70s or older and in uncertain health, are unlikely to take the stand until 2010.