The trial of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and six codefendants on charges of genocide against the Kurdish minority in 1980s resumed Thursday after being delayed for less than two hours for security alert in Baghdad's Green Zone.

The security alert raised after a sniffer dog detected something at a security gate in the heavily-fortified Green Zone where the Saddam trial would be held.

The incident kept the judge waiting for the defense lawyers who were unable to reach the court.

Saddam and six of his aides are facing charges of genocide against Kurds in the trial of Operation Anfal (Spoils of War), in which prosecutors said that up to 180,000 Kurds were killed, many of them by poison gas and mass killings.

On Wednesday's session, Faiq Mohammed Ahmed, a Kurdish surgeon, told the court he witnessed or heard accounts of dozens of deaths in separate attacks during the spring of 1988 when he was working at a Kurdish militia hospital.

In a cross-examination, one of Saddam's codefendants, Sabri al Douri, former chief of military intelligence, claimed that Iran launched the chemical attacks.

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

On Nov. 5, 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 for killing of 148 people after a failed assassination attempt against Saddam in the town of Dujail, some 60 km north of Baghdad.

On Sunday, the defense lawyers of Saddam officially appealed to the higher court against the death penalty imposed on Saddam and another two codefendants.

Source: Xinhua