BAGHDAD, April 17 -- Handwriting experts confirmed that Saddam Hussein signed a document linking him to the killing of 148 people during his rule as Iraqi president, prosecutors said at Hussein's trial on Monday.

Most of the hour-long session was taken up with arguments over the authenticity of several documents dealing with the aftermath of an assassination attempt against Hussein in the town of Dujail in 1982. A panel of three experts said in a report that the documents were authentic; defense attorneys argued that the experts were biased.

The document signed by Hussein concerned promotions for officers involved in a crackdown against Shiite Muslims in Dujail. Another document involved the head of the intelligence service and listed families whose farmlands were to be razed in retaliation for the attempt on Hussein. While several witnesses have described suffering brutal torture at the hands of the Hussein's Baathist government, the documents are the only hard evidence so far to directly link Hussein and seven co-defendants to the Dujail massacre.

Hussein and his half brother refused to provide handwriting samples to the court, so the experts compared handwriting on the documents with those of Hussein and several co-defendants written during Hussein's presidency. They concluded that the writing matched in every case except that of Mizher Abdullah Kadhim, a Baath Party leader in Dujail at the time of the incident. The experts said Kadhim's handwriting did not match that on a sample he had provided to the court.

"He changed his handwriting so often that it was difficult" to analyze, the report said.

Defense attorneys challenged the report, saying it was biased.

"The three experts are members of the present government and the occupation authorities and as such they are not neutral," said Khalil al-Dulaimi, one of the defense attorneys. "We want the court to call for international experts from any foreign country except Iran."

"Also Israel," Hussein added from his chair in the courtroom. Barzan Ibrahim, Hussein's half brother and the former head of his intelligence service, also railed against the prosecutor, Jafar al-Mousawi, calling him "dishonest" and "one hundred percent biased against us."

At the opening of the session, Chief Judge Raouf Abdel Rahman noted that an appeals court had rejected defense requests to have him removed from the trial for bias. Lawyers have argued that because Abdel Rahman is a Kurd -- an ethnic minority repressed by Hussein's government -- he is unfit to judge the former president.

"I say in absolute terms that there is no bias of any type on my part toward any of the defendants," Abdel Rahman said. "This case shall be settled in accordance with the evidence presented."

The appeals court also backed Abdel Rahman in a separate dispute in which Dulaimi claimed the judge had made comments showing bias against Hussein. Abdel Rahman ordered Dulaimi to pay a fine of 2,000 Iraqi dinars -- the equivalent of $1.30.

Hussein mostly remained silent throughout the session, speaking only after the trial had been adjourned. Reporters covering the trial were not allowed to watch and only a few seconds of his remarks were shown on Iraqi television.

Abdel Rahman concluded the proceeding by ordering a team of five handwriting experts to verify Hussein's writing on other documents that had been presented during the trial. The trial will resume on Wednesday, he said.

There were few reported incidents of violence on Monday, after a string of days in which scores of Iraqis died in bombings and shootings. The U.S. military reported that Marines repelled a coordinated attack on the main government building in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, by insurgents using suicide bombs, mortars and grenades. There were no reports of U.S. casualties.

There was also an unusually violent street battle in Adhamiyah, a predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood in Baghdad.

One witness said that at least eight Dodge Ram pickup trucks drove into Adhamiyah from the east just past midnight on Monday, apparently running into a roadblock guarded by armed men from the neighborhood. Shooting broke out immediately and lasted for hours as Iraqi and U.S. troops arrived. U.S. jets circled overhead, and the cellphone network to the area was cut off for hours.

At least one mortar round exploded in the neighborhood. One resident said that three neighborhood residents and several outsiders were killed. People in the community described later how they cowered in their houses, afraid to go out on a street littered with bodies, as gunshots crackled and rocket-propelled grenades smashed into walls.

Accounts varied as to exactly what had happened. Mohammed al-Askeri, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry, said in an interview broadcast on al-Arabiya television that some men were captured and that an investigation had begun.

He suggested that the men in the pickup trucks were Interior Ministry police, who have been accused, along with Shiite militias, of kidnapping and killing Sunni Arabs in nighttime raids. In response, many Sunni neighborhoods have organized local defense forces to fend off outsiders.

U.S. military authorities released a different account of the incident, saying that an Iraqi army patrol came under fire just before 4 a.m. in Adhamiyah. A few hours later, a group of 50 gunmen attacked a checkpoint manned by U.S. and Iraqi forces, the military said. Reinforcements cordoned off the neighborhood and five terrorists were killed and seven detained.

In other incidents, the Interior Ministry found the bodies of at least a dozen men in Baghdad who had been tortured and shot. Iraqi police also reported that four people were found dead in the southern city of Basra, and two others were killed by a bomb in the town of Baqubah, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Al-Jazeera television also reported that police had found the body of Taha al-Mutlak, the brother of Saleh al-Mutlak, a prominent Sunni Arab politician. He had been kidnapped a few days earlier, the network reported.

Special correspondents Bassam Sebti, Saad al-Izzi and Naseer Nouri in Baghdad and Hassan Shammari in Baqubah contributed to this report.