It has been the most chilling testimony in the 14 months since former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and his associates first went on trial -- an account of how Iraqi death squads took 301 victims to remote desert sites in the late 1980s, herded them into pits dug by power shovels and gunned them down.
Among the victims, the court has been told, nearly 80 percent were women and children, with 90 percent of the children aged 13 and under.
After two years of forensic work, US experts were in court last week to detail findings from three mass grave sites dating from Saddam's so-called Anfal military campaign against Iraqi Kurds.
The sites were chosen from among more than 200 mass graves identified since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the experts said what they found there, and in other graves, revealed "the same pattern over and over again," of a systematic program to carry out mass killings quickly, efficiently and in secret.
The testimony seems likely to stand as the closest any account will get to the final torment suffered by many of the 180,000 Kurds prosecutors say were killed in the campaign.
Moreover, with the experts' reliance on computer-aided analytical tools and graphics available only in recent years, their evidence may constitute the most complete narrative any courtroom has heard of how mass killings of the scale that were committed in Iraq have been carried out.
As he has at other moments when the court has heard accounts of atrocities against civilians, Saddam listened impassively -- showing little more than a bookkeeper's interest.
The former Iraqi leader, 69, took copious notes and offered only brief, mostly matter-of-fact comments.
At one point, he demanded to know the precise geographic coordinates of the exhumed graves, and their proximity to main roads.
He added that the court should not take his interest in the details as an acknowledgment that he or his co-defendants "had anything to do" with the killings.
This was the first time that the men accused of directing the killings -- Saddam and his six co-defendants, including Ali Hasan al-Majid, known among Iraqis as Chemical Ali for his role in chemical weapons attacks against the Kurds -- had been confronted in open court with details of what happened at the mass graves.
The principal forensic witness was Michael Trimble, a 53-year-old forensic archaeologist from St Louis.
He told of finding tangled piles of victims, many with eyes blindfolded, wrists bound, and roped together chain-gang style; of one mother lying in death with her right hand clutching a baby, who like the mother had been killed with a single pistol shot to the head; and of another mother with the bones of an unborn child that remained folded in her dress as her body decomposed.
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