Inscription: Introduction to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. In the past '"TUOL SLENG" Museum was one of the secondary schools in the capital, called "Tuol Svay Prey" high-School. After the 17th, April 1975 Pol Pot clique had transformed it into a prison called "S.21" (Security office 21) which was the biggest in Kampuchea Democratic. It was surrounded with the double wall of corrugated iron, surmounted by dense barbed wires. The classrooms on the ground and the first floors were pierced and divided into individual cells, whereas the ones on the second floor used for mass detention Several thousands of victims (peasants, workers, technicians, engineers, doctors, teachers, students, buddhist monks, ministers, Pol Pot's Cadres, soldiers of all ranks, the Cambodian Diplomatic corps, foreigners, etc. ) were imprisoned and exterminated with their wives and their children… There are a lot of evidences here proving the atrocities of Pol Pot clique: cells, instrument of torture, dossiers and documents, list of prisoner's names, mugshoots of victims, their clothes and their belonging's. We founded the mass graves surrounding, and in particular, the most ones situated 15 Km in the south-west of Phnom Penh, in the village of Chhoeung Ek, District Dangkor, Kandal Province.
The Khmer Rouge took control the country on 17, April 1975 and people were forced to evacuate the city to countryside. In the same year, the Khmer Rouge turned Tuol Svay Prey High School into a prison and interrogation center known as Security Prison 21. It became the largest detention center in the country, and out of almost 20,000 prisoners detained there only seven survived. When the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Penh in 1979, the prison was turned into a genocide museum.