Phnom Penh - Documents showed 177 prisoners were released from the Khmer Rouge's notorious S-21 torture centre, the Documentation Centre of Cambodia
(DC-Cam) told local media Thursday in a dramatic turnaround from previous statements that only seven people had survived.

DC-Cam previously maintained only a handful of people had survived the torture centre by the time the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979 and up to 16,000 had died there. DC-Cam is credited with archiving thousands of documents left by the 1975-79 Democratic Kampuchea regime and being the foremost documentary authority on it.

DC-Cam has supplied the bulk of documentary evidence to the joint UN-Cambodian court set up to try former leaders of the Khmer Rouge.

"These are documents sitting there for the past 30 years," the English-language Cambodia Daily quoted DC-Cam director Youk Chhang as saying.

Chhang said the 177 released prisoners should "not be considered survivors as they had been spared by their captors."

He was unavailable for comment Thursday as to why DC-Cam had not drawn public attention to the historically invaluable documents earlier nor perused testimonies of released prisoners before the indictment of former S-21 jailer Kaing Guek Euv, alias Duch, if it knew of them.

In July 2007, DC-Cam initially disputed the claims of Chim Math, who was subsequently recognized by others as S-21's first known female survivor, saying no available documents supported her claims.

It was unclear if the new evidence would affect the defence case for Duch, who was expected to face court as early as October.

Duch is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity and has not denied overseeing the centre, where men, women and children were beaten, starved and subjected to horrors, including being forced to wear buckets of live scorpions on their heads.

In his August 8 indictment, the co-investigating judges upheld the previously held theory that nobody was ever released.

Up to 2 million Cambodians perished under the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge regime. (dpa)