Baghdad, Iraq ? The trial of Saddam Hussein took startling turns Thursday when prosecutors said the first witness would be a bedridden cancer patient who helped run Iraq’s feared intelligence agency. In the first setback, an attorney for one of the dictator’s co-defendants was kidnapped.

Iraq’s premier, meanwhile, said he was proud the court gave Saddam – whom he called “one of the world’s most hardened criminals” – so much freedom to talk at Wednesday’s opening session. A defiant Saddam refused to answer the chief judge’s questions and said he did not recognize the legitimacy of the proceedings because he was still president.

The prosecution of Saddam and seven of his regime’s henchmen in a mass-murder case could be a lengthy process. It is the first of up to a dozen that prosecutors plan to bring to trial against Saddam and his Baath Party inner circle for atrocities during their 23-year rule.

Wednesday’s opening session saw the 68-year-old former president proclaim his innocence to charges of murder, torture, forced expulsion and illegal imprisonment stemming from a 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in Dujail, a mainly Shiite town north of Baghdad, following a failed attempt on Saddam’s life. The former dictator and his co-defendants could be sentenced to death if convicted.

The trial will resume Nov. 28, but the court will interview a key witness Sunday because of his poor health.

Wadah Ismail al-Sheik, director of the investigation department at Saddam’s Mukhabarat intelligence agency at the time of the Dujail massacre, will give his testimony in a hospital Sunday, court officials said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. They declined to say which hospital.

The United States says the agency is the same one that tried to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993.

Prosecutors said al-Sheik played an important role in the events at Dujail. If he recovers, they said, he may be a defendant in a separate, related case. The officials did not give details on the other case and did not specify al-Sheik’s age.

In another trial development, 10 masked gunmen kidnapped the attorney for one of Saddam’s co-defendants, police said. Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, who was in the courtroom Wednesday, is one of two attorneys representing Awad Hamed al-Bandar, one of the seven Baath Party officials also being tried.

The gunmen pulled up outside al-Janabi’s office in Baghdad’s eastern Shaab district in the evening, broke into the building and dragged him out, said Police Maj. Falah al-Mohammedawi of the Interior Ministry.

Al-Janabi was one of 13 defense attorneys in Wednesday’s session. His client was the head of Saddam’s Revolutionary Court at the time of the massacre and is accused of issuing the execution orders.

Meanwhile, teams of international and Iraqi election officials went to several provinces to start auditing initial results from Saturday’s key constitutional referendum that showed an unexpectedly high number of “yes” votes.

Sunni Arabs, who largely oppose the charter, charged fraud when initial results showed it had been approved and accused the government’s Shiite and Kurdish leaders of fixing the balloting.

A crucial question is whether the audit will review data from two provinces that could determine the outcome – Ninevah in the north and Diyala in the east. Both are believed to have slim Sunni Arab majorities, but initial results reported by provincial officials showed about a 70 percent “yes” vote in each.