Hi-tech lab unearths horrors from Saddam's graves

BAGHDAD, July 9 (Reuters) Case number 19 was about six months old when Iraqi soldiers forced the 300 women and children, one of them holding the baby, into a mass grave in the desert and killed each of them with a shot in the back of the head.

Holding the infant among the piles of bodies was case number.

20, a woman in her thirties wearing purple and green Kurdish dresses, killed by a shot from the same 9 mm pistol.

With the help of cutting-edge technology, US-led forensic experts are uncovering evidence from mass graves of alleged victims of Saddam Hussein that Iraqi prosecutors hope will offer damning evidence in his trial for genocide against the Kurds.

The bodies, believed to be from the Anfal campaign for which Saddam will face charges next month, have been painstakingly unearthed and analysed in a laboratory near Baghdad and the graves mapped with digital photography and laser technology.

The results are three-dimensional digital maps that allow experts to reconstruct anything from the trenches where victims were taken before being shot, to the trauma they suffered, to the bullets' trajectory or the exact position of the killers.

As Saddam's trial for crimes against humanity for the killing of 148 Shi'ites in 1982 winds down, with defence lawyers due to make final arguments tomorrow, experts say forensic evidence will play a crucial role in the Anfal case.

''Almost everything we do is electronic,'' said Michael ''Sonny'' Trimble, a forensic archaeologist from Missouri who leads the team excavating the mass graves in Iraq.

''We didn't have this technology 10 years ago,'' said Trimble, whose team has experience in Kosovo, Bosnia and Rwanda.

The Dujail case over Shi'ite villagers, the first of many trials Saddam is likely to face for crimes during his rule, has rested almost entirely on witnesses' accounts and documents.

The Anfal case is the first in which Saddam will be confronted with evidence from mass graves. By some estimates 4,500 villages were razed and hundreds of thousands killed during a 1988 campaign that still haunts northern Kurdistan.

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