Chemical Ali vowed clouds of poison

Gruesome tapes of Saddam Hussain's most feared henchman threatening to cut up his thousands of victims "like cucumbers" have been disclosed as Iraqi war crimes judges began court proceedings against him yesterday.

Ali Hassan Al Majid, Saddam's cousin and the man nicknamed Chemical Ali for gassing up to 5,000 Kurds, is also heard vowing to swamp Kurdish villages with clouds of poison for up to 15 days as part of his brutal campaign of suppression in the late 1980s.

In chilling words that foreshadow the mass graves that now litter the country, he gives warning that the body count will be so great that Iraqi forces will have to "bury them with bulldozers".

His armies are thought to have murdered anything up to 150,000 Kurdish men, women and children.

The full transcripts of Al Majid's bloodcurdling speeches have been revealed by the international campaign group Human Rights Watch.

On the tapes, Al Majid talks in his distinctive, high-pitched voice of demolishing swathes of Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq to crush their attempts at rebellion against Saddam's rule.

During the campaign thousands of villages were destroyed and their inhabitants killed in an "ethnic-cleansing'' project, intended to clear the way for ethnic Sunni Arabs to move into the area.

Al Majid can be heard ordering officials and army chiefs to carry out savage reprisals against any areas that try to resist.

"As soon as we complete the deportations we will start attacking them everywhere according to a systematic military plan," he says.

Al Majid even criticises his master for being too lenient when he orders that the families of Kurdish resistance leaders should not be harmed.

"A message reaches me from that great man, the father [Saddam], saying 'Take good care of the families of the saboteurs. Take good care of them? No, I will bury them with bulldozers.''

He also orders that millions of leaflets be distributed throughout the north warning the Kurds to leave, although he asks that the leaflets bear the stamp of the local Ba'ath Party rather than Saddam.

Al Majid, who describes the Kurds variously as "dogs'' and "goats'', also boasts of razing their houses and placing them in collectivised compounds "without any compensation".

Anybody who refuses to live in the ghettoes, he adds, should be rounded up by Ba'ath Party commanders to face his wrath.

"Immediately I will say, 'Blow him away, cut him open like a cucumber'".