Colonel Sarhad Kadar of the Iraqi police said the mass grave had been found in Tarkalan 25 kilometres (16 miles) southeast of the northern city of Kirkuk in the grounds of an abandoned military camp dating from the 1980s and 1990s.

"They were alive when they were buried," he said.

During the late 1980s, Saddam's forces carried out a brutal scorched earth campaign against northern Iraq's Kurdish minority in a bid to stamp out separatism and secure Kirkuk's oil fields.

The former strongman was overthrown in 2003 in a US-led invasion and is now on trial in Baghdad accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in an operation which prosecutors say killed 182,000 Kurds.