BAGHDAD (AFP)- A defiant Saddam Hussein on yesterday exchanged angry words with the presiding judge and heard testimony from the first prosecution witness as the trial of the former Iraqi dictator resumed after a 40-day break.

After barely two hours in session, the court was adjourned to December 5 to give time for one of Saddam’s seven co-defendants to appoint his own defence lawyer.

Saddam, who faces charges including murder and torture that carry the death penalty, showed no sign of toning down the combative stance he adopted at the first hearing in October.

Dressed in a smart Western suit with a white handkerchief neatly folded into the top pocket, Saddam engaged in an angry opening skirmish with judge Rizkar Mohammed Amin over his treatment at the high-security Baghdad courthouse, set up in the former headquarters of Saddam’s Baath party.

He complained he had been forced to walk the stairs into the courtroom, as the lift was broken, and had been put in handcuffs on the way to the court, making it hard for him to carry a copy of the Koran.

He then lambasted US security staff for confiscating his pen and paper, saying: “How can a defendant defend himself if they take even his papers and pen?”

The Kurdish Amin who as in the first hearing appeared unflappable in the face of Saddam’s verbal jousts promised he would tell the guards to return the papers.

But Iraq’s one-time dictator said “don’t tell them, order them. You are an Iraqi, you have sovereignty, they are in your country, they are foreigners, they are invaders.”

The charges relate to the killing of 148 men and youths from the Shiite village of Dujail, north of the capital, after Saddam escaped an assassination attempt there in 1982.

The court was shown testimony from wheelchair-bound Waddah Ismail al-Sheikh, a former intelligence official, who told of how a dozen men, hiding in an orchard, had set an ambush for Saddam’s convoy.

Some who escaped into the orchard after the attack were gunned down by Saddam’s bodyguards, he said.

Barzan then ordered troops to spread out through the town where they rounded up some 400 people, men, women and children, including entire families, Sheikh said.

The detainees were taken the next day to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad for interrogation.

Saddam and Barzan both sat in silence as they listened to the testimony.

Other evidence viewed by the court included a video clip from a British television programme showing Saddam in Dujail in 1982.

Former US attorney Ramsey Clark, a left-wing activist who made several visits to Iraq in the run-up to the 2003 US invasion, was formally sworn in as one of Saddam’s lawyers although he did not speak.