Kurdish Survivors Testify As Saddam Trial Resumes

Saddam Hussein sat silently in court today as a Kurdish man described how, aged 12, he survived a firing squad from the former dictator's regime which shot dead his mother and three sisters.

The testimony by Taimor Abdallah Rokhzai, now 30 and living in the US, came as the trial of Saddam and six former members of his regime on war crimes and genocide charges resumed after a 19-day break.

The hearing, relating to a military crackdown on Iraq's Kurd population in 1987-88, is separate to the trial which saw Saddam sentenced to death three weeks ago for crimes against humanity, linked to an earlier massacre in the Iraqi town of Dujail.

Saddam and his co-defendants - mainly represented by court-appointed lawyers due to a continued boycott by their own defence team - listened as Mr Rokhzai described the mass killing in 1988.

"There was a trench. We were lined up. A soldier shot directly at us. I was hit on my shoulder," he told the court.

"The soldier kept firing at us. I saw my mother's headscarf fall, my sisters and relatives were bleeding and then they all died," Mr Rokhzai said through a Kurdish-Arabic interpreter.

"I begged the soldier: 'We are women and children. Why are you shooting us?"' he said.

"I saw bullets hitting a woman's head and her brain coming out, I saw a pregnant woman shot and killed. It was horrible.

"The shooting suddenly stopped. It was quiet. I was waiting to die. My whole body was covered with blood. The soldiers then went away. They were talking among themselves. I wanted to get out from the trench. But a little girl asked me where I was going. I don't know her name but she was alive," he said.

Mr Rokhzai said he eventually fled the trench alone and began walking. He was sheltered in a series of villages until 1991, when a Kurdish autonomous zone was established under the protection of US and British forces.

According to the prosecution, around 180,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the campaign against the Kurds, codenamed Operation Anfal.

Saddam and one other defendant have pleaded innocent to the additional charge of genocide.

The charges on which Saddam has already been sentenced to hang were chosen for the first trial as they were considered relatively straightforward and simple to prove.