NEW YORK, March 30: Photojournalist Dith Pran, whose harrowing survival of genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was dramatised in the film “The Killing Fields,” died on Sunday at the age of 65.

He died of pancreatic cancer at a New Brunswick, New Jersey, hospital, The New York Times said on its web site.

Dith, who used his fame to draw attention to his country’s plight, spent the last weeks of his life in the hospital surrounded by family and friends. Among them was Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sydney Schanberg, who worked with him for The Times during the Cambodian civil war and recalled him as a dogged journalist who was “always doing good deeds for people in the Buddhist tradition.”

Best known for his depiction in the 1984 film “The Killing Fields,” Dith worked in Cambodia as a translator and journalist assisting Schanberg, who credits Dith with saving his life when they were arrested by the Khmer Rouge.

Forced into a labour camp when the radical Communists seized control of his homeland in 1975, Dith endured four years of starvation and torture. He lost more than 50 relatives to the Khmer Rouge, including his father, three brothers, a sister and their families.—Reuters