During eight months on trial, Saddam has said more than once that he expected to be sentenced to death. So there was little surprise that he reacted dismissively when the prosecutor, Jaafar al-Moussawi, called for the death penalty in the case.

Earlier in the trial, Saddam boasted that he had escaped death before, apparently a reference to fleeing Iraq in 1959 after participating in an attempt to assassinate the then-president, Abdul Kareem Kassem.

Moussawi also urged the court to pass death sentences on Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's half brother and former head of the Mukhabarat secret police; Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice president and head of a Baath party militia known as the Popular Army; and Awad Bandar, former head of the revolutionary court that approved death sentences for 148 Shiite residents of Dujail. The town, 55 kilometers, or 35 miles, north of Baghdad, is where the alleged assassination attempt took place in 1982.

Moussawi urged the court to acquit Mohammed Azawi, one of four Baath party members from Dujail who were charged with participating in the repression that followed the alleged assassination attempt.

He said the judges should "minimize the punishment" of three others - Abdullah Ruwayid; his son Mizhar Ruwayid, and another defendant, Ali Dayeh Ali - who were accused by the prosecution, along with Azawi, of helping Saddam's secret police round up hundreds of townspeople.

By arguing for acquittal or light sentences for the four Dujail men, the prosecutor effectively narrowed the court's focus to Saddam and his three close associates.

They are charged with crimes against humanity for their role in events that included the executions; the deaths during torture of 46 men and youths who had died by the time Bandar's court sentenced them to death; the deportation of 399 other townspeople, including women and small children, to a desert detention camp in southern Iraq; and the razing of most of the fruit orchards and date palm groves around Dujail.

Iraqi law provides that death sentences in criminal cases be carried out by hanging, except for military courts, which can order execution by firing squad.

Officials of the Iraqi High Tribunal, the special court established to try Saddam and other high-ranking officials of the former government for the worst atrocities committed during his 24 years in power, have said that any death sentences handed down by the court and upheld on appeal will be carried out by hanging. But that eventuality, at least for Saddam, appears to be many months, and possibly several years, away.

Although the prosecution completed its closing arguments in the Dujail case Monday, after more than 35 days of hearings since the case began in October, the trial is expected to continue into mid-July.

The chief judge, Raouf Abdel Rahman, ordered a recess until July 10, when the dozen or more lawyers representing Saddam and other defendants will begin their closing arguments.

The court then will take a lengthy recess to reach its verdicts, which court officials say could come by September. But Saddam and his associates are almost certain to carry the case to the court's nine-judge appellate division, a process that court officials say could take six months or more.

Iraqi law stipulates that death sentences must be carried out within 30 days of a ruling on a final appeal. But Saddam already has been named as a defendant in a second case, involving the killing of 50,000 Iraqi Kurds in the so-called Anfal military campaign that began in 1988 and involved chemical weapons attacks and purges that sent the residents of entire villages to mass graves. That trial is expected to begin while the Dujail case is in recess.

Court officials say the Anfal trial is likely to run for many months, probably longer than the Dujail trial, because it is more complex.

Despite the 30-day requirement on death sentences, senior officials in the new Iraqi government, including President Jalal Talabani, who is a Kurd, have said they want to see Saddam convicted in the Anfal case before he is executed, an approach that suggests that the former Iraqi ruler, even if sentenced to hang in the Dujail case, could escape the gallows for two years or more.