Rahman said the ousted president ordered the killing and torture of hundreds in the village, including women and children, and that he sent helicopters and planes to pound Dujail, north of Baghdad.

Wearing a dark suit and white shirt, Saddam smiled as he listened to the charges, holding a Koran in his left hand. “This statement cannot influence me or shake a hair of my head. What matters to me is the Iraqi people and myself,” Saddam said. “I am president of Iraq by the will of the Iraqi people.” Replying the judge said: “You were, but not now.”

Rahman said some of the men and women taken prisoner in Dujail by Saddam’s security forces were tortured with “blows to the head and electric shocks” and that five died under torture.

He also read out the names of 32 of the 148 who were under 18 and therefore should not have been executed under then-existing Iraqi and international law, the judge said.

The court then called Saddam’s half-brother Barzan al- Tikriti, former chief of the feared intelligence security forces, who dismissed charges read out to him as “lies”. If found guilty, Saddam, 69, faces a death sentence.

<B>Criminal cases Saddam could face</B>

■ <B>KURDISH GENOCIDE </B>

Iraqi government forces launched a drive in 1987 and 1988 to reassert government control over Kurdish areas in the north. The campaign, dubbed “Anfal” or “Spoils of War”, saw entire villages flattened, farming destroyed and inhabitants forcibly removed. Kurdish authorities say hundreds of thousands of Kurds were displaced and tens of thousands killed. A mustard- and nerve-gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja killed as many as 5,000 people in March 1988. Saddam’s cousin, General Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as “Chemical Ali”, is accused of carrying out the worst of the atrocities. He has said the crackdown was to punish Halabja for its failure to resist Iranian incursions during the Iran-Iraq war.

■ <B> INVASION OF KUWAIT </B>

Saddam is accused of violating international law by ordering the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. A US-led coalition demanded Iraq’s withdrawal and went to war on January 17, 1991, after Saddam refused to comply with UN resolutions. The war ended on February 28 after Iraq’s expulsion from the emirate.

■ <B>MARSH ARABS </B>

The Iraqi army, under Saddam’s orders, is alleged to have systematically destroyed the livelihood of Iraq’s Marsh Arab people, who have inhabited southeastern marshlands at the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers for nearly 5,000 years.

■ <B> POLITICAL KILLINGS </B>

Saddam and his security forces have been accused of numerous politically motivated killings and other human rights abuses, including the execution of five Shi’ite religious leaders in 1974, the murder of thousands of members of the Kurdish Barzani clan in 1983 and the assassinations of political activists.