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".