Witness Abdullah Mohammed Hussain said he met Saddam in 1989 after he returned from Iran, where he had fled to escape the brutal Anfal campaign which prosecutors claim killed 182,000 Kurds.

Saddam and six others are in the dock facing charges over the former regime forces' bombing, imprisonment, killing and burial of Kurds in mass graves during the Anfal attacks that coincided with the last years of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

If found guilty the defendants will face execution by hanging.

Taking the witness box, Hussain described the 1988 attacks on his northern village near Sulaimaniyah and recounted his meeting with Saddam, which he said had materialised after repeated requests to the Iraqi military.

"I told Saddam they (relatives) were arrested in our village," Hussain said.

"Saddam said ... 'Shut up. Don't say that they went missing in Anfal,'" Hussain said as the former military strongman watched from the dock.

He was later told in 2004 by the Sulaimaniyah court that the ID cards of his relatives were found in a mass grave in Hathat, near the northern city of Mosul.

Hussain was the 18th witness to testify against the accused since the trial began on August 21.

Two more witnesses were set to testify on Thursday.

On Wednesday, prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon demanded the resignation of presiding judge Abdullah al-Ameri, saying he was lenient with defendants and allowed them to threaten the witnesses and lawyers.

"Defendants have gone too far, with unacceptable expressions and words. Defendants have uttered clear threats," Faroon said.

Ameri dismissed the demand.

On Tuesday, Saddam threatened one of the witnesses' lawyers as he defended the fight of the Kurdish guerrillas or peshmerga -- which means "those who face death" in Kurdish -- against the old regime.

Saddam accused him of being an agent of "Iranians and Zionists" and threatened to "crush his head".

On the first day of the trial, Saddam had also threatened Faroon after he charged that the deposed ruler's forces had raped Iraqi women during the Anfal campaign.

"If he says an Iraqi woman was raped in my era and he does not prove it, I will hunt him down for the rest of my life," Saddam said at the time.

On Wednesday, four witnesses gave graphic testimonies against the accused.

Witness Omar Othman Mohammed, a peshmerga fighter from Sulaimaniyah, accused Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed "Chemical Ali," of leading the attacks and using chemical bombs.

"He (Majid) killed a large number of our peshmergas, civilians and members of the opposition Dawa and communist parties," he said, referring to a bomb attack on March 22, 1988.

"The warplanes hovered over the region and dropped balloons, apparently full of chemical weapons. Then missiles followed. A couple of them fell near my place. I saw headless bodies and parts of bodies, like arms and legs."

Another witness, Sadoon Khider Gader, also gave a gruesome account of how dogs were set free on prisoners killed in detention centres.

"They (the prisoners) were badly treated and those who died were carried by their mates outside" the detention centre and buried, said Gader, who lost his two sons.

"We saw dogs eating them (the corpses) through the windows."

The Kurdish accounts of the attacks have often left Saddam annoyed who has justified the crackdown on Kurds as a counter-insurgency operation.

On Tuesday, after a long litany of condemnations he said "I noticed today that there were too many insults... when we put a lion in a cage, any coward can bring a stick and hit him."