Ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein brushed aside a Kurdish villager's account on Tuesday of an alleged massacre, saying there was no proof, as he returned to court two days after being condemned to hang in a separate trial.
The former president was sentenced on Sunday to be executed for committing crimes against humanity by ordering the deaths of 148 Shias from the village of Dujail, north of Baghdad, after a 1982 assassination attempt.
On Tuesday, with a smile on his face and wearing his trademark dark business suit, a composed Saddam walked into the court and quietly took his seat, even as his defence team continued its boycott of the Kurdish genocide trial.
The chief judge in the genocide trial, Mohammed al-Oreibi al-Khalifa, quickly opened the 21st session by summoning the day's first Kurdish witness, Qahar Khalil Muhammad.
Muhammad told the court how dozens of Iraqi Kurds, including 18 of his relatives, were gunned down by Saddam's forces in 1988 in a northern village of Quromai.
He said an Iraqi army officer, swearing on the Holy Quran, had assured the villagers that no harm would come to them if they surrendered and they would be offered amnesty by Saddam.
"Trusting the officer, we surrendered," he said.
"They led us out of the village, separated men from the women and children. A total of 37 men were separated, including myself," Muhammad said.
He said the officer later lined up the men and ordered the soldiers to fire at them. "We all fell to the ground. When the first magazine was emptied, they began reloading with a second magazine and then a third magazine," Muhammad said.
The officer told the soldiers to "shoot everyone with a bullet. A soldier hit me on my forehead," the witness told the judge, lifting his turban to reveal a deep scar there.
He was also shot in the back, and showed his back to a court-appointed defence lawyer who demanded to see his bullet wounds.
"I want the whole world to see my wounds," Muhammad said.
After the soldiers left, he saw that his father and two brothers were among 18 relatives who had been killed. A total of 33 villagers died there, he said.
"I found Hashim, my nephew, still alive. I held his hand and we fled."
He and a number of others were later caught by the army and put in a detention camp. He was held there for three years before being released under an amnesty.
Saddam heard the entire testimony quietly and later stood up in the dock to reject it. "There is nobody to check this testimony. Who supports his claim? Nobody," he said. "Will that way lead us to the truth?"
The day's second witness, Abdul Karim Nayif, 39 and from the same village as Muhammad, corroborated the story and also presented a video film he said was of the site where the villagers were shot.
The video, which was shown to the court, had workers from a non-governmental organisation standing near a mass grave and finding human remains like a vertebra, bones from arms and legs and several skulls, one of which was crushed.
The video was taken when the grave was uncovered in the middle of 1992.
Prosecutors say the Anfal campaign was a genocidal massacre of 182,000 Kurdish civilians. Saddam and his alleged henchmen insist it was a legitimate counter-insurgency operation against separatist guerrillas.
Saddam faces a second death penalty if convicted in the Anfal trial although he could be executed over the Dujail killings before the Kurdish case winds up.
Dozens of Kurdish witnesses have given similar chilling accounts in previous sessions of how Saddam's forces swept through their villages in 1988, killing thousands in chemical gas attacks and razing their homes.
Saddam's disbanded Baath party, meanwhile, threatened to attack the heavily-protected "Green Zone" in Baghdad if the death sentence for Dujail is carried out, according to an Internet statement posted on Tuesday.
It vowed to "use all possible means to destroy embassies, as well as the headquarters of intelligence and treacherous organisations" in the heavily-protected Green Zone nerve centre of US-backed power of Baghdad.
A day after the death sentence, however, a top official in Baghdad said that Iraqi leaders had agreed a draft law to allow former Baath members back into government jobs.
Ali al-Lamy, head of the Supreme National Council for De-Baathification, said the proposed reform could reverse the sacking of more than a million former Baathist activists, mainly members of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority.