TWO members of Saddam Hussein's regime have gone on trial in Baghdad on charges of persecuting political opponents while in power.

Saddam's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, and the dictator's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, are charged with "crimes against humanity". Majid, known as Chemical Ali, has already been handed two death sentences by Iraq's courts.

Some of the alleged crimes were against members of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa party. It is reported that Aziz, Majid and more than 20 other defendants are charged over the alleged persecution of members of the Dawa party, founded in the Fifties.

Mr al-Maliki, who became Iraq's PM in 2006, joined the Dawa party as a young man in 1970. But he fled Iraq in 1979 and lived as an opposition leader abroad until the US-led invasion in 2003, and was sentenced to death in absentia by Saddam's Ba'ath party government.

Majid was sentenced to death for his role in crushing a Shia uprising in 1991. Aziz was condemned to hang for genocide over the killing of 100,000 people during the 1988 Anfal campaign against Iraq's Kurds.

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