Tuesday, August 21, 2007  | The Associated Press

BAGHDAD: A witness on Tuesday recalled the random shooting deaths of a teenaged girl and three other people in a square packed with detainees as Saddam Hussein's forces rounded up Shiites after a 1991 uprising against his regime after the Gulf War.

The dramatic testimony capped the opening day of Iraq's third trial against former regime officials, with Saddam Hussein's cousin known as "Chemical Ali" and 14 others facing charges of crimes against humanity when they crushed the Shiite uprising and killed tens of thousands. Three of the defendants already have been sentenced to death in another case.

One of those  --  Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's cousin and the former defense minister who gained the nickname "Chemical Ali" after chemical attacks on Kurdish towns during the so-called Anfal campaign  --  entered the courtroom wearing his traditional white Arab robe and a red and white checkered headdress.

The chief judge Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa told the men they were charged with crimes against humanity, which court officials said included murder, torture, persecution and random detentions. The crimes carried the maximum penalty of death by hanging, he said.

The charges stem from the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, in which the U.S. drove Saddam's forces from Kuwait.

Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north  --  repressed under Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime  --  sought to take advantage of the defeat, launching uprisings and seizing control of 14 of the country's 18 provinces.

U.S. troops created a safe haven for the Kurds in three northern provinces, preventing Saddam from attacking. But the late dictator's troops marched into the predominantly Shiite south and crushed that uprising.

Iyad Abdel-Zahra Ashour, a 41-year-old teacher, testified that he was arrested by the military while visiting his brother in the hospital. The brother was wounded while trying to prevent people from looting a wheat mill on March 2, 1991, in the southern city of Basra.

Ashour was held with more than 300 other detainees on a square surrounded by military units, he said.

He said al-Majid and co-defendant Abdul-Ghani Abdul-Ghafour, a senior Baath Party official, went personally to the square and shot to death three people, including a 14-year-old girl who tried to talk to him.

The detainees were later transferred to prisons where they were beaten and tortured, he said.

"They tried to get me to confess, but I resisted because I was innocent," he said, adding he was later released but never learned the fate of his brother whom he had left in the hospital.

"The hospital officials told us that al-Majid at that time had ordered that all wounded people be executed because they were from the opposition," he said.

The defendants who spoke on Tuesday maintained their innocence and questioned the U.S.-backed court's credibility.

Sabir al-Douri, former director of military intelligence, told the judge he was in Baghdad during the 1991 uprising and did not visit the south during this period.

Sabawi Ibrahim, who was one of Saddam's half-brothers and head of the feared Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the uprising, defended the regime's invasion of Kuwait as Iraq's "historic right."

"This court was established by the occupiers who ignored the international law and invaded Iraq without the permission of the United Nations," he said.

Ibrahim said the Shiite uprising had been orchestrated by Iran and militant Iraqi exiles sponsored by Tehran.

"Iran failed to achieve its goal in the 1980-1988 war, but it seized the chance in 1991 to kill Iraqis and loot Iraq," he said. "Iran used its elements and agents to destroy Iraq. I am surprised that words of praise are used to describe 1991 events."

A 65-year-old retired army officer, Reibit Jabar Risan, the first witness called to the stand, said his cousin and nephew were killed when the army had shelled his village of Hawyer near Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, 550 kilometers (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad, after villagers attacked and burned the police station at the start of the uprising.

It was the third trial of former regime officials after the Dujail case, in which Saddam and three others were hanged for the 1982 killings of 148 Shiites, and the trial of those accused of killing more than 100,000 Kurds in a 1980s military campaign known as Anfal.

Al-Majid and two other defendants  --  Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai, the former defense minister who led the Iraqi delegation at the cease-fire talks that ended the 1991 Gulf War, and Hussein Rashid Mohammed, a former deputy director of operations for the Iraqi armed forces  --  were sentenced to death in the Anfal case but were standing trial in the Shiite uprising case pending their appeals.