Saddam Hussein was charged yesterday with genocide over a campaign against the Kurds in the 1980s which culminated with the gassing of Halabja, the largest-scale chemical weapons attack since the Second World War.

The Iraq tribunal, already trying the former Iraqi dictator for alleged crimes against humanity punishable by death, was formally presented with the new charges yesterday morning.

Whatever the outcome of his chaotic ongoing trial, which restarts in Baghdad today after a three-week adjournment, no sentence will be discharged until all legal proceedings have concluded. Up to a dozen other further cases are believed to be waiting in the wings.

Charges have also been laid against six members of Saddam's inner circle in connection with Operation Anfal (Spoils of War) - a campaign in which 180,000 Kurds are said to have been killed.

Raid Juhi, the investigative judge, said that the charges had been filed with another judge who will review the evidence and order a trial date. The move is the equivalent to an indictment under the Iraqi legal system.

He said: "These people were subjected to forced displacement and illegal detentions of thousands of civilians. They were placed in different detention centres. The villages were destroyed and burnt. Homes and houses of worshippers and buildings of civilians were levelled without reason or a military requirement."

Others accused include Ali Hassan Majid, the former defence chief known as Chemical Ali; Sultan Hashim Ahmad, a former defence minister; Saber Abdul Aziz al-Douri, a former intelligence chief; Hussein al-Tirkiti, aformer Republican Guard commander; Taher Tafwiq al-Ani, a former Nineveh provincial governor; and another former top military commander, Farhan Mutlaq al-Jubouri.

Saddam and seven others members of his former regime have been on trial since October over the the deaths of more than 140 Shia Muslims in the village of Dujail. The defendents are accused of sanctioning a massacre following an assassination attempt on the president.

Iraqi authorities have chosen to try Saddam separately for each of the various alleged crimes rather than bring all the cases together into one proceeding.

President Jalal Talabani of Iraq assured reporters that Saddam would be tried for all his crimes before any of the sentences are implemented. Most of the cases pending carry the death penalty.

In December, a Dutch court sentenced a chemicals merchant, Frans van Anraat, to 15 years in prison for selling Saddam’s regime the chemicals used in the gas attacks. The ruling, the first ever dealing with atrocities under Saddam, concluded that the attacks constituted genocide.

One document used in evidence at the Dutch trial was a government decree, number 4008, said to have been signed by Saddam on June 20, 1987 ordering "special artillery bombs to kill as many people as possible" in the Kurdish area. Special artillery, Dutch prosecutors said, meant chemical weapons.

Chemical Ali was heard in an audio clip on April 21, 1988, ordering that people caught in the Kurdish areas "have to be destroyed ... must have their heads shot off." In another radio fragment he said: "I will attack them with chemical weapons and kill them all."

The Halabja deaths were captured on camera by the Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan, who was subsequently awarded a Pulitzer Prize. He later described the aftermath of the gas attack, in which up to 5,000 were killed.

"Victims were still being brought in. Some villagers came to our helicopter. They had 15 or 16 beautiful children, begging us to take them to hospital. So all the press sat there and we were each handed a child to carry. As we took off, fluid came out of my little girl's mouth and she died in my arms," he said.

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