Hundreds from Saddam regime will face war crimes tribunals

Thousands of charges likely to be heard by court that will be set up within days, as proof of insurgents from Lebanon emerges

Saddam Hussein and hundreds of his aides could be tried for crimes against humanity and genocide in an Iraqi-led tribunal that will be established in the coming days, according to Iraqi and American officials.

The law creating the tribunal - which could be passed as early as today - will be similar to proposals made in Washington in April, one member of Iraq's Governing Council said on Friday. It calls for Iraqi judges to hear cases presented by Iraqi lawyers, with international experts serving only as advisers. That would be starkly different from UN-sponsored tribunals set up to consider war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. In those cases, international judges and lawyers have argued and decided cases.

Two members of the council - Mahmoud Othman and Samir Shakir Mahmoud - said the tribunal would be created in the coming days, as did an official of the US-led occupation authority, who chose not to be named.

Mr Othman said the tribunal would hear hundreds of cases involving members of the former regime. "There will be more trials than the deck of cards," he said, referring to the notorious US "pack" of most-wanted Iraqis. "Anybody against whom a complaint is filed, with evidence against them, could be tried." Already, thousands of relatives of the missing have filed complaints against members of the former regime.

It remained unclear when the trials would begin. The coalition authority now holds at least 5,500 people in prisons, but it isn't known how many of those are war crimes suspects and how many are accused of common crimes.

Those in custody include Ali Hassan al-Majid, or "Chemical Ali" as he is known, for his role in the attacks on Kurds in the 1980s; Saddam's secretary, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, and Muhammad Hamza al-Zubaydi, a leader of 1991 suppression of the Shia Muslim rebellion. If Saddam himself were captured, he too would presumably be tried.

Prosecutors will draw on a huge and growing cache of documents seized from the former regime. Evidence will also come from the excavation of mass graves that dot the Iraqi landscape. Some 270 mass graves are believed to hold at least 300,000 sets of remains.

Human rights workers said the trials could include genocide cases - for the campaign against Kurds in northern Iraq in the 1980s, and for the draining of southern marshes in 1992 that drove many Shias from their homes. They also could include cases against former Iraqi officials for the massacres of Shias and Kurds in 1991, when those communities rose up against Saddam at the end of the Gulf War.

News of the tribunals came as Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, visited Baghdad. He said yesterday that he wanted to further accelerate deployment of Iraqi security forces and defended the Pentagon's handling of Iraq. A US military commander in the north told Mr Rumsfeld he did not need extra American troops, and that recent aggressive US operations aimed at crushing the insurgency had prompted Iraqis to come forward with better intelligence tips. (AP)