Iraqi troops dragged prisoners to a pit dug out of the desert sands and shot them two-by-two under the lights of a waiting bulldozer, a survivor of Saddam Hussein's alleged genocide said on Tuesday.
The ousted Iraqi leader and his co-defendants sat impassively in the dock in the Iraqi High Tribunal in Baghdad as five witness added their testimony to the growing body of evidence of a mass slaughter of civilian prisoners.
Speaking from behind a curtain, the first witness told the court he had been among 35 Kurdish detainees taken into the desert near the western Iraqi city of Ramadi in April 1988, during Saddam's "Anfal campaign".
He had been arrested and held for three days before he and his fellow detainees were put blindfolded into bus a driven into the desert at sunset.
"When I managed to get my blindfold off, I saw them bringing two every time and shooting them, then throwing them in the ditch. The ditch was full of dead and still living bodies," he added.
"A brutal guard in a green uniform jumped down into the ditch and started shooting those who were still alive and cursing them.
"There was a mechanical shovel on the ridge whose headlights shone on the ditch to help the executioners," he added.
One of the prisoners was forced to say the prayer of Shahada, in which Muslims pledge allegiance to God before death, he said. One of those killed was the witness's cousin, Saleh Amin Ahmed.
"I managed to run away, exploiting the absence of a guard. While I was running I saw and heard gunfire and the shrieks of those being killed in cold blood," he told the court.
The escapee headed east out of the desert and managed to eat some dry wheat from a field outside Ramadi, where he met shepherds. He returned to his village of Tob Khana the next year and found it razed to the ground.
Prosecutors say that 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 and two of his six fellow accused face the death penalty if convicted. Judge Mohammed al-Oreibi al-Khalifa adjourned the case until November 7, by which time Saddam may already be facing the gallows.
On Sunday, Saddam and seven co-defendants are due to hear the verdict in a previous trial in which he was accused of ordering the deaths of 148 Shia villagers in revenge for an attempt on his life.
This case also carries a possible the death penalty.
A second witness told on Tuesday of how he and fellow detainees were taken out of a detention centre in Tob Zawa in northern Iraq on a fleet of 10 buses.
The driver told the prisoners they were being taken to Mosul, but when they stopped in a remote area to nightfall, the detainees rebelled.
"There was a guard brandishing a Kalashnikov," he told the court.
"One of the detainees tried to snatch the gun from him but failed. The guards from the other buses started shooting at our bus. I threw myself from the open door of the bus and started running away," he said.
"I saw my friends falling like leaves from tree due to the shooting." The third Kurd to testify, 46-year-old housewife Bafrin Fattah Ahmed, said that on August 10 she was blinded by poison gas and lost touch with her son and husband when warplanes attacked the village of Hiran.
She received hospital treatment and regained the sight in one eye.