Saddam Hussein and seven co-accused returned to court today and proceedings focused on attempts to prove the ousted Iraqi president signed documents implicating him in crimes against humanity.
A criminal expert's report was read out in court which said Saddam's signatures were on documents connecting him with the killing of 148 Shi'ite men and teenagers after an attempt on his life in the town of Dujail in 1982.
Saddam has said he ordered the trial which led to the execution of the men, saying that any president who escaped an assassination attempt was entitled to crack down.
But Saddam and his half-brother and former intelligence chief Barzan al-Tikriti have refused to give the Iraqi tribunal in Baghdad a sample of their handwriting.
One of Saddam's lawyers, Khamis al-Obeidi, requested the court appoint other experts, saying those testifying were members of the Interior Ministry.
"They cannot be independent when they have links to the Interior Ministry and the state," he said.
Chief judge Raouf Abdel Rahman adjourned the trial until Wednesday to give the experts more time to authenticate the signatures of Saddam and Barzan.
Saddam, wearing a dark suit and white shirt, sat in a metal pen listening quietly as the report was presented in court, in sharp contrast to previous sessions which were dominated by his tirades. He could face hanging if found guilty.
Barzan criticised chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi and accused him of leaking the results of a criminal expert report on his handwriting to a radio station.
He also repeated the line that fraudulent signatures were easy to come by in Iraq.
"My signature is very simple, anyone can imitate it," said Barzan, a former Iraqi ambassador in Geneva.
Saddam could soon face trial on charges of genocide in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s in which more than 100,000 people were killed and thousands of villages razed.