Iraq's ousted leader Saddam Hussein's genocide trial against the Kurdish minority in the 1980s resumed on Thursday in a Baghdad court.

Saddam and six of his aides are facing charges of genocide against Kurds in the trial of Anfal case, 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, prosecutors presented documents, including a March 1987 memo by Saddam military intelligence saying "the president ordered us to prepare a study with experts about launching a sudden strike on the bases of the Iranian (Ayatollah) Khomeini's guards and their agents Barzani saboteurs using special ammunition."

Prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon submitted another memo confirming the attacks using "conventional and special weapons" carried out by Iraqi warplanes against Kurdish targets, including 10 villages.

Faroon said that classified documents indicated that three of Saddam codefendants sanctioned the chemical attacks, which are:

Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's cousin, also known as "Chemical Ali", Taher al-Ani, senior official of Saddam's Baath party and Farhan Mutlak al-Juboury, the ex-chief of eastern Iraq's military intelligence.

The court also heard a harrowing account about some former Iraqi army leaders ordered beheading a mentally ill Kurdish man and killing three Kurds by pushing them from a helicopter.

During Monday's session, Saddam Hussein reiterated that he would shoulder by himself the responsibility for anything occurred during his regime, but he did not confess to the charges.

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

Source: Xinhua