the event. There, the Khmer Rouge sentenced Pol Pot to life imprisonment; the three other commanders were sentenced to death. Three months later, Ta Mok permitted Thayer to visit and interview Pol Pot. On 15 April 1998, Pol Pot died in his sleep of a heart attack. Thayer, who was present, claimed that Pol Pot killed himself when he became aware of Ta Mok's plan to hand him over to the United States, saying that "Pol Pot died after ingesting a lethal dose of a combination of Valium and chloroquine". His body was preserved with ice after an improvised embalming with formaldehyde had failed, so that his death could be verified by journalists attending his funeral. Three days later, his wife cremated his body on a pyre of tyres and rubbish, utilising traditional Buddhist funerary rites. In May, Pol Pot's widow and Tep Khunnal fled to Malaysia, where they married. The Khmer Rouge themselves continued to face territorial losses to the Cambodian Army and in March 1999 Ta Mok was also captured, and the Khmer Rouge effectively ceased to exist. Political ideology Pol Pot considered himself a communist, and he described his CPK as adhering to a "Marxist–Leninist viewpoint", albeit one that had been adapted to Cambodian conditions. According to New York Times journalist Christopher Jones, Pol Pot, at some time in his life, had imbibed a heady mixture of Marx's Das Kapital and Hitler's Mein Kampf. According to key Khmer Rouge figure Khieu Samphan, a key concept was "zero for him, zero for you - that is communism", in that in a society where all things were the possession of the state and no individual owned anything, everyone would be equal. Pol Pot took up ideas of orthodox Marxism–Leninism but, contrary to Marx and Lenin's concepts, he believed in the ideal of an entirely self-sufficient and agrarian socialist society that would be entirely free from all foreign influences. Joseph Stalin's work has been described as a "crucial formative influence" on Pol Pot. Even more influential was the work of Mao Zedong, particularly his New Democracy. Following Mao's thoughts and political example, in the mid-1960s Pol Pot reformulated his ideas about Marxism–Leninism to better suit the Cambodian situation. Due to these alterations, various other Marxist–Leninists said that he was not truly adhering to Marxist–Leninist ideas. For instance in 1979, Deng Xiaoping criticised the Khmer Rouge for engaging in "deviations from