The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Sydney Schanberg, passed away on Saturday in Poughkeepsie, New York, having suffered a heart attack a few days earlier.

A foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Mr Schanberg won international acclaim for his reporting of the Khmer Rouge insurgency and subsequent genocide, along with his Cambodian assistant, Dith Pran.

In 1975, as the American-backed government crumbled at the end of a five-year civil war, Mr Schanberg and Mr Dith refused to flee from the approaching Khmer Rouge, going against the pleas of their editors in New York. They were amongst just a handful of journalists who remained in the capital, Phnom Penh.

Mr Schanberg was therefore present at the beginning of the Cambodian genocide. Millions of people were forced to leave the cities, with Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot attempting a hideous social experiment by forcibly attempting to convert the entire country into his vision of a farming paradise.

As a foreign national, Mr Schanberg was in danger of being executed as a foreign spy; only interventions by Mr Dith saved his life. Eventually Mr Schanberg made it over the border into Thailand; it was four years before Mr Dith was able to escape across the same border. He had managed to survive a genocide which saw two million die through murder, starvation and forced labour. The experiences of Mr Schanberg and Mr Dith were the subject of the 1984 Academy Award winning film, The Killing Fields.

Sydney Hillel Schanberg was born in Massachusetts in 1934 to Louis and Freda Schanberg. He married twice; first to Janice Sakofsky in 1967, and then to Jane Freiman in 1985. He had two daughters from his first marriage. Mr Dith passed away in 2008, at the age of sixty five.