Hussein charged with genocide

Ex-Iraqi leader to face trial for alleged role in attack on Kurds

Saddam Hussein in defiant mood during an earlier court appearance.

GENOCIDE

Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, including:

Killing members of the group

Causing serious bodily or mental harm

Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction

Imposing measures intended to prevent births

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

As defined in the statutes of the Iraqi Special Tribunal in accordance with the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has been charged for the first time with genocide, Iraqi chief investigative judge Ra'id Juhi announced Tuesday.

Juhi said that investigators had completed their work gathering witnesses and evidence and were ready to go to trial.

Hussein and six co-defendants -- including Ali Hassan al-Majeed, a former Iraqi general known as "Chemical Ali" -- will stand trial for genocide on charges relating to the Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s.

That campaign included the gassing of 5,000 civilians in the village of Halabja in 1988, but Juhi told CNN that the incident was not included in Tuesday's charges and would be prosecuted separately.

Estimates of the number of deaths in the Anfal operation range from 50,000 to nearly 200,000.

Hussein is already on trial with seven co-defendants from his former regime on charges of crimes against humanity in Dujail, a town north of Baghdad, after a failed assassination attempt against the ex-Iraqi leader in 1982. (The charges against Saddam Hussein)

It is unclear when the Anfal trial would begin; it could start as early as next month. It is also not clear how or if the two trials would go on at the same time.

Hussein's current trial is set to resume Wednesday after a three-week recess.

The former Iraqi leader angrily testified March 15 before much of the session was closed to the media.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said Tuesday he expected the special tribunal hearing the cases would hear all of them before rendering a verdict in any.

"I believe the court is working on a plan whereby he will be tried for all the crimes then a verdict will be handed down," he said.

Hussein could face up to 20 trials on various charges, including the 1991 suppression of the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq.

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