Baghdad, Iraq ? The first witnesses in the Saddam Hussein trial offered chilling accounts Monday of killings and torture using electric shocks and a grinder during a 1982 crackdown against Shiites, as the defiant ex-president threatened the judge and tried to intimidate a survivor.

One witness said he saw a machine that “looked like a grinder” with hair and blood on it in a secret police center in Baghdad where he and others were tortured for 70 days.

But defense lawyers questioned the reliability of witnesses who were only 15 and 10 at the time and walked out of the tumultuous session when the judge refused to allow former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark to address the court on Saddam’s behalf. They returned after the judge relented.

Throughout the daylong session, Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin struggled to maintain order among boisterous defense outbursts. Saddam and his co-defendant and half brother, Barazan Ibrahim, gestured and shouted together, “Long live Iraq!”

Saddam and his seven co-defendants could be hanged if convicted on charges stemming from the deaths of more than 140 Shiites in the town of Dujail after an assassination attempt in 1982.

“I am not afraid of execution,” Saddam proclaimed at one point.

The trial’s first witness, Ahmed Hassan Mohammed, delivered a rambling, two-hour account of the events in Dujail in retaliation for an armed attack on Saddam’s convoy.

Mohammed recalled how security agents rounded up townspeople of all ages, from 14 to more than 70.

“There were mass arrests. Women and men. Even if a child was 1 day old, they used to tell his parents, ‘Bring him with you,”‘ Mohammed said.

Torture tactics

He said the agents took him and the others to the intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, where they were tortured before being transferred to Abu Ghraib prison.

Mohammed said his brother, who was then 17, was tortured while his 77-year-old father watched. Interrogators threatened to rape the prisoners’ daughters and sisters if the men did not sign confessions, he said.

“Some men just said ‘I will sign anything, but leave my sisters alone,”‘ he said.

Mohammed, who was 15 at the time, said he himself was tortured. “They blindfolded me, but I was so young, it kept falling.” At the Baghdad detention center, he saw “a machine that looked like a grinder and had some blood and hair” on it, and “I saw bodies of people from Dujail.”

The witness exchanged insults with Ibrahim, Saddam’s half brother, telling him “you killed a 14-year-old boy.”

“Go to hell,” replied Ibrahim, who was intelligence chief at the time.

“You and your children go to hell,” the witness replied.

The judge then asked them to avoid such exchanges.

Second witness

The second witness, Jawad Abdul-Aziz Jawad, who was only 10 when the assassination attempt occurred, testified that Iraqi helicopters attacked the town and used bulldozers to destroy the fields and orchards.

Jawad said Saddam’s regime killed three of his brothers, one before the assassination attempt and two afterward.

Saddam’s chief attorney, Khalil al-Dulaimi, challenged Jawad, asking how a 10-year-old could remember such details.

“A 3-year-old child remembers a lot,” Jawad replied. “An elementary school student does not forget if a teacher slapped him in the face. I live a catastrophe.”

Earlier, Mohammed said he was told that Saddam asked a 15-year-old boy if he knew who he was. “He said ‘Saddam.’ Then Saddam hit him in the head with an ashtray.”

The testimony drew an angry response from Saddam, who suggested that Mohammed needed psychiatric treatment and accused the court of bowing to American pressure.

Saddam told Amin he hoped “that you will endure my frankness.”

“How can a judge like yourself accept a situation like this?” Saddam asked. “This game must not continue. If you want Saddam Hussein’s neck, you can have it. I have exercised my constitutional prerogatives after I had been the target of an armed attack.”