Cambodia marked on Thursday the 50th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge's march into Phnom Penh, though survivors of its genocidal rule were forbidden from praying before victims' skulls.
On April 17, 1975, soldiers of the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge rolled into the capital astride tanks, toppling the U.S.-backed republican army of Lon Nol and starting a four-year communist government.
To remember victims, a Cambodian opposition party asked authorities for permission to hold a memorial at Choeung Ek — the most notorious of the Khmer Rouge's "Killing Fields" — in the capital Phnom Penh.
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