BAGHDAD, 7 December 2005 — A woman testified yesterday from behind a screen — her voice disguised but her weeping still apparent — that she was stripped and tortured with beatings and electric shocks by Saddam Hussein’s agents in the trial of the former president and seven lieutenants.

In contrast to the day before, when he interrupted and berated male witnesses, Saddam sat stone-faced and silent, taking notes on a pad of paper, as the woman, known only as “Witness A,” told the court how she and dozens of other families from the town of Dujail were arrested in a crackdown after a 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam.

Two other witnesses — a man and a woman — testified yesterday, all with their identities concealed.

“I was forced to take off my clothes, and he raised my legs up and tied up my hands. He continued administering electric shocks and beating me,” Witness A said of Wadah Al-Sheikh, an Iraqi intelligence officer who died of cancer last month.

Several times, the woman — hidden behind a light blue curtain — broke down. “God is great. Oh, my Lord!” she moaned, her voice electronically deepened and distorted.

She strongly suggested she had been raped, but did not say so outright. When Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin asked her about the “assault,” she said: “I was beaten up and tortured by electrical shocks.”

The witness, who was 16 at the time of her arrest, repeated that she had been ordered to undress. “They made me put my legs up. They were more than one, as if I were their banquet, maybe more than five people, all of them are officers,” she said.

“Is that what happens to the virtuous woman that Saddam speaks about?” she wept, prompting the judge to advise her to stick to the facts.

When asked by the judge which of the defendants she wanted to accuse, “Witness A” identified Saddam. “When so many people are jailed and tortured, who takes such a decision?” she said.

She later quoted a security officer as telling her, “You should thank God because you are here in the Intelligence Center. If you were in the directorate of security, no woman would remain virgin.” Nevertheless, she also said that many fellow female detainees lost their virginity to security guards.

Saddam and the others are on trial for the killing of more than 140 Shiites in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad and could be executed by hanging if convicted.

Defense attorneys insisted on questioning the witness face to face and demanded that the defendants should also see her. So after she gave her testimony for over an hour, Amin ordered the session closed to the public, pulling screens in front of the press and visitors gallery and cut the sound.

Later, a second woman took the stand, identified as “Witness B.” She said she was 74 years old and recounted how her family was arrested in 1981 — a year before the Dujail incident.

Until that point in her testimony, her voice was modulated. But, the judge decided it was not working properly. The system was turned off and all of the electronic feeds from the court room cut, including to the press gallery, before the witness could explain the relevance of a 1981 arrest.

“Witness C,” a man, testified that he was taken by security forces along with his parents and two infant sisters. They spent 19 days at the intelligence headquarters and 11 months in Abu Ghraib, where his father died after being beaten on the head. Then they spent three years in the desert.

“At the intelligence headquarters, they put two clips in my ears,” the witness said, adding that he was told that if he lied, he would be given an electric shock. When he answered a question, the shock was administered, he said.

“My father died in prison and I was not able to see him.” He added that his father, who was 65 and had heart problems, was kept in a room about 50 yards from him.

That prompted an outburst from Saddam, who complained of his own conditions in detention. He said the court had time to listen to the witnesses’ complaints “but does anyone ask Saddam Hussein whether he was tortured? Whether he was hit?”

He urged the judge to investigate his conditions because “it is your duty as judges to investigate the crime at its scene.”

“I live in an iron cage covered by a tent under American democratic rule. You are supposed to come see my cage,” he told Amin.