Photographer of the Khmer Rouge featured in The Killing Fields has died

Dith Pran, Cambodia's most famous and heroic photographer depicted in the 1984 movie The Killing Fields, has died. The NY Times reports:

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation. . .

He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. . .

A dramatic moment, both in reality and cinematically, came when Mr. Dith saved Mr. Schanberg and other Western journalists from certain execution by talking fast and persuasively to the trigger-happy soldiers who had captured them.

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More about The Killing Fields film at Wikipedia