The trial of former leader Saddam Hussein and six codefendants on genocide charges against Iraqi Kurdish minority in the 1980s resumed in a Baghdad court on Monday.

It is a continuation of Thursday's session over Anfal case which the prosecutors said that about 180,000 Kurds were killed in the 1987-88 crackdown, many of them by poison gas and mass killings.

During the past sessions, the court heard testimonies from four American forensic experts who submitted what they found in searching remains of hundreds of Kurds in several mass graves in northern and southern Iraq.

If convicted, Saddam could get his second death penalty following the first one he got from the trial of Dujail.

On Sunday, lawyers for Saddam Hussein have formally submitted an appeal against the death sentence on their client for crimes against humanity in the separate trial of Dujail in which 148 people were killed in the aftermath of crackdown on the town after a failed assassination attempt on the ousted leader Saddam Hussein in 1982.

A panel of five Iraqi judges sentenced Saddam, his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and Iraq's former chief judge Awad Hamed al- Bandar to death by hanging on Nov. 5 for the killings in the town of Dujail, some 60 km north of Baghdad.

Source: Xinhua