By Julia Wallace

PHNOM PENH

The second phase of a United Nations-backed hearing established to try the remnants of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge leadership was cut short Thursday when one of the two defendants was hospitalized.

The regime’s head of state Khieu Samphan complained of dizziness and was sent to a local hospital for further assessment.

Judge Nil Nonn told the court: “We have a letter from the treating doctor that says Mr. Khieu Samphan feels very dizzy and his blood pressure is very high, and now the treating doctors at the ECCC decided to send him to the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital because he felt sick and could not attend the hearing.”

He said hearings would resume Friday if doctors cleared Samphan.

The hearing had began with questioning of witness Meas Sokha, who testified about his experience living in Tram Kak district of southwestern Takeo province, an early ideological center of the Khmer Rouge.

Samphan and Pol Pot’s deputy Nuon Chea were sentenced to life in prison in August in the trial’s first phase, accused of crimes against humanity in connection with their role in mass evacuations.

The second phase being heard is far broader in scope, encompassing charges of genocide against Cambodian Muslims and Buddhists as well as forced labor, murders and purges.

The court, known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), had split the case into phases in order to make trials more manageable.

One of Khieu Samphan’s lawyers, Kong Sam Onn, told the Anadolu Agency that his client had seemed fine before the hearing started, and speculated that perhaps the stress of being on trial had caused his sudden illness.

“After this morning, when he saw all the lawyers, maybe he got stressed out by the proceedings” he said, adding that Samphan was suffering from “convulsions” as well as high blood pressure and a “serious headache.”

“When I look at him, I can feel he is really pained,” he said, explaining that his client’s release from the hospital could take as much as a week.

The first phase of the trial, which ran from late 2011 until 2013, was also marked by frequent delays due to the defendants’ ill health and old age. Nuon Chea in particular frequently had to watch proceedings while reclining in a holding cell in the court’s basement rather than sitting inside the courtroom.

In March 2013, a third defendant Ieng Sary, the Khmer Rouge’s foreign minister who was often seen as the regime’s third-most powerful figure, died in the middle of the trial.

Sary’s wife Ieng Thirith, who was the regime’s social action minister, was originally part of the case before being deemed unfit for trial due to age-related dementia.

The second trial phase has also been delayed for months due to a boycott by Khieu Samphan’s lawyers, who demanded that it not begin until the end of the year -- when appeal briefs in the first trial phase were due.

The ECCC accused the lawyers of misconduct and referred them to their home-country bars for potential disciplinary action, but was nonetheless forced to delay the trial.