PHNOM PENH, Cambodia – Cambodia will build a memorial at the Tuol Sleng ******** Museum to remember at least 12,000 people tortured and ****** there during the radical Khmer Rouge regime, officials said Thursday.

The museum, formerly a high school in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, was turned into S-21 prison after the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. Of the estimated 16,000 men, women and children who passed through its gates, only a handful survived.

The construction of the memorial will “ease the mind” of the ********* of the ******** and serve as an educational tool for the next generation to remember and prevent the return of such a dark regime, said Kranh Tony, an official attached to the special tribunal for the ******** crimes.

An estimated 1.7 million people **** as a result of the Khmer Rouge’s radical policies from 1975 to 1979.

The Buddhist stupa will replace a similar memorial that disintegrated inside the Tuol Sleng complex. It will be completed in nine months.

The museum’s renovation began in 2010.