Handwriting experts authenticated Saddam Hussein’s signature on memos approving death sentences for 148 Shiites and the confiscation of farmlands during an Iraqi crackdown in the 1980s, the chief judge in the former Iraqi leader’s trial said today.

A suicide car bomber killed two Iraqis and wounded five today in an attack on a police patrol in an area of Baghdad where insurgents had kidnapped and murdered a defence lawyer in Saddam Hussein’s trial last week, police said.

The defence team in the trial of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has demanded that the case be delayed or moved out of Iraq, following the kidnapping and murder of one of its lawyers.