Earlier, the ousted Iraqi leader returned to the dock with the resumption of his trial on charges of genocide against Kurds during the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s.
Updated at 5.45 pm
BAGHDAD: The trial of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on charges of genocide against the Kurdish people adjourned until Tuesday following the testimony of three witnesses on Monday.
Earlier, the ousted Iraqi leader returned to the dock on Monday with the resumption of his trial on charges of genocide against the Kurds during the so-called Anfal campaign of the late 1980s.
Saddam and six co-defendants stand accused of slaughtering 182,000 Kurds by gassing them and bombing their villages in the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq in 1987 and 1988.
The trial had resumed after a three-week recess, on the day the United States marks the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington that left close to 3,000 people dead.
On Friday a US Senate report concluded that Saddam had no links with Al Qaeda prior to the September 11 attacks, as US President George W. Bush's administration had repeatedly charged.
And Saddam's presence in court may spark renewed debate over whether the United States was right to go to war on Iraq in March 2003, since when more than 2,600 US troops have been killed.
Saddam, who is also awaiting a verdict in a trial over the killing of Shiite villagers after an attempt on his life in 1982, is charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity over the Anfal campaign.
Six other defendants, including Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed "Chemical Ali" over his alleged role in gas attacks, also stand accused over the massacres of Iraq's minority Kurds.
The genocide trial began on August 21, and the first three days saw Kurdish villagers testify that their villages had been gassed, their fields destroyed and their families exterminated in brutal death camps run by Saddam's forces.
The court is expected to meet in three sessions this week, with at least six more witnesses testifying against the accused. So far, six Kurds -- four women and two men -- have testified.
In the previous trial, in which Saddam was charged with the mass murder of 148 Shiites from the village of Dujail, witnesses were concealed behind screens, fearing reprisals from Sunni insurgents loyal to the former leader.
While the Dujail trial was a noisy show of political theatre -- with Saddam and his former aides blustering angrily in the dock and staging walk-outs and hunger strikes -- the Anfal case has seen the accused looking more subdued.
The witnesses, however, have not held back their fury.
"May God blind them all," cried 45-year-old Adiba Owla Bayez, one of the witnesses at the last hearing on August 23.
Bayez told the court how she and her family were temporarily blinded by gas during an air raid by Iraqi jets on her village of Belisand on April 16, 1987.
"It was a judgment day," she told the court.
Saddam remained largely quiet during the first three days of the trial, except when a prosecutor accused his forces of raping Kurdish women.
Threatening prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon, Saddam thundered: "If he says that an Iraqi woman was raped in my era and if he does not prove it, I will hunt him for the rest of my life."
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