SADDAM HUSSEIN could be executed within months if he is found guilty of ordering the massacre of 140 people from the town of Dujail, the chief prosecutor said last week.

The ousted Iraqi dictator, who faces 11 other charges,will not be able to cheat the hangman by dragging out legal proceedings in a series of trials.

The prosecutor Ja’afar Moussawi said that under a law passed late last year all death sentences must be carried out within 30 days of an appeal failing, regardless of any other pending charges.

“Once one of the accused on the Dujail case, for example, has been sentenced to death, then he won’t be tried on other charges,” Moussawi said in an interview. “Other charges will automatically be dropped against that particular defendant, even if the case itself is brought against others.”

Moussawi was reluctant to be drawn on how long the Dujail case, which began four months ago against Saddam and seven co-defendants, would take but said it had “passed the 75% mark”.

A panel of nine judges had already been selected to hear any appeal and the process was unlikely to take more than a month, he said. Under Iraqi law it was not possible for a death sentence imposed on anyone — including the former president — to be commuted.

The prosecutor’s comments will be welcomed by many Shi’ites and Kurds exasperated by the slow pace of the trial and by its accelerating descent into farce as the accused repeatedly hurl insults at the judges.

However, abandoning other trials that might shed light on Saddam’s role in atrocities ranging from a poison gas attack that killed 5,000 Kurds at Halabja in 1988 to the brutal suppression of a Shi’ite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991 may dismay the relatives of those who died. Many are desperate to know about the events that destroyed their lives.

According to one Kurdish group that searches for missing people, some women consider themselves still engaged to fiancés who vanished decades ago, while many married women cannot accept they have become widows.

Prosecutors selected the massacre — carried out in the predominantly Shi’ite town of Dujail — for the first case against Saddam because it appeared easier to prove than those involving wider allegations of genocide.

The 140 allegedly killed were accused of taking part in a botched attempt to assassinate Saddam when he visited their village 40 miles north of Baghdad in 1982. Many more were tortured.

According to government officials, retaliation against the villagers was led by Barzan al-Tikriti, a half-brother of Saddam who was head of intelligence, and by Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice-president. They are also on trial.

However, the case has not proceeded as smoothly as prosecutors hoped. Although 26 witnesses have given heart-wrenching accounts of torture and imprisonment during the crackdown, proving that Saddam was directly responsible has been difficult.

On Tuesday the prosecution produced documents that purported to show the former dictator had ordered the killings, and called two witnesses. Both complained that they had been made to testify and could not provide useful testimony. One, Fadhil al-Azzawi, a former ambassador in Moscow, said he had not even been in Iraq at the time.

“I reject being a witness in this case because I do not have information,” al-Azzawi said. “I was forced to come to court.”

Three other former Saddam loyalists who were compelled to give evidence last week failed to corroborate most of the prosecution claims.

Saddam has punctuated the proceedings with outbursts and announced last week that he and his co-defendants were going on hunger strike to protest against the judge, Raouf Abdel-Rahman, who took over the case last month.

This followed a walkout last month by the entire defence team, which has refused to return unless Abdel-Rahman is replaced. The court has appointed other lawyers in their place but the defendants have refused to accept them.

The defence claims the judge cannot be impartial because he was born in Halabja, the scene of the gas attack, and some of his relatives died.

Lawyers also claim he was a member of a Kurdish party opposed to Saddam’s regime and that he was convicted in absentia and given a life sentence in one of Saddam’s courts in 1977.

Several international human rights groups have criticised the handling of the trial and have argued that it should be moved to an international tribunal.

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