Empty chair as "Saddam" trial resumes

BAGHDAD, Jan 8 (Reuters) All eyes will be on the empty chair in the dock today when the genocide trial of the ousted Iraqi leadership resumes in Baghdad.

Nine days after Saddam Hussein was hanged, the former president's cousin ''Chemical Ali'' Hassan al-Majeed and six other Baath party officials are back in court accused of trying to wipe out Iraq's ethnic Kurds in the northern mountains in 1988.

Many Kurds regret the chief suspect can no longer face justice for his role in the Anfal campaign against them, thanks to an earlier trial for crimes against humanity for killing Shi'ites -- but they hope others share his fate on the gallows.

For supporters of the US-sponsored High Tribunal, today will be a day to return the focus to sober judicial process after the undoubted embarrassment that illicit video of Saddam's execution has brought to a court judging Iraq's former rulers while its current government is struggling to avert civil war.

Yet controversy over Saddam's last minutes and the sectarian taunts he faced from Shi'ite officials on the scaffold goes on.

Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government has yet to complete an investigation into the jeers and the video -- one court officer has accused a senior official of filming the event -- and Maliki has offered a robust defence of the execution.

But his government has found itself on the receiving end of one of the first public appeals by the new United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, whose chief of staff has written to Baghdad urging ''restraint'' in the use of the death penalty.

British finance minister Gordon Brown, the likely next prime minister of Washington's main ally in occupying Iraq, called the execution ''deplorable''. A spokeswoman for outgoing leader Tony Blair has said he believes the way the hanging was done was ''completely wrong''.

''LOGISTICAL'' DELAY Impressions Maliki rushed the hanging through in haste ahead of the New Year, at the start of a Muslim holiday, were reinforced yesterday when lawyers and an official said two of Saddam's aides, now on death row, were meant to hang with him but were spared at the last minute for ''logistical'' reasons.

Saddam's half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and former judge Awad al-Bander were moved to a special wing at the US military jail and told to write their wills at the same time as Saddam in time for an execution at dawn on December. 30, their lawyers said.

Bizarrely, Iraqi state television read an official pronouncement in the hour after Saddam was hanged saying all three men convicted on November. 5 had been executed. Officials only later said that Barzan and Bander were still alive.

They are likely to hang any day now, though no date is set.

Maliki signed their death warrants at the same time as Saddam's.

Late-night negotiations with US diplomats who, Maliki's aides said, wanted the hangings put off for two weeks eventually produced an American agreement to deliver Saddam by helicopter to the gallows in northern Baghdad. Only this Sunday did it transpire that transport problems may have spared his two aides.

''For logistical reasons they were postponed, because the Coalition could not provide the logistics on the same day as Saddam was executed,'' Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie told CNN, eight days after the execution.

REUTERS DKS PM0533