An Iraqi court is to decide on Tuesday the fate of Saddam Hussein's notorious hatchet-man "Chemical Ali" Hassan al-Majid and 14 others accused of committing war crimes during the 1991 Shiite uprising.

The hearing, set for 11 am (0800 GMT), comes after harrowing testimony from witnesses of Saddam's crushing of the rebellion who described family members being thrown from helicopters and mass executions.

Majid was sentenced to death in June 2007 for genocide after ordering the deaths of tens of thousands of Kurds during the 1988 Anfal campaign, when Iraqi forces strafed villages with poison gas, the source of his grim nickname.

Iraq's presidential council approved the death sentences of Majid and two other former senior military officials -- Sultan Hashim al-Tai, another former defence minister, and Hussein Rashid al-Tikriti, former armed forces deputy chief of operations -- in February, after months of legal wrangling.

But the three remain in US custody and have since been charged with committing similar war crimes in southern Iraq during the Shiite uprising that followed Saddam's crushing defeat at the hands of US forces in the 1991 Gulf War.

Perhaps as many as 100,000 people were killed as troops carried out massacres around the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and the Hilla and Basra regions and shelled towns and villages across the south.

Many Shiites who participated in the uprising say they had expected US forces to back them, but former US president George Bush instead ordered a halt at the Iraqi border, leaving the rebels at the mercy of Saddam's forces.

Majid served as minister of the interior at the time, after serving as the military governor of Kuwait. The 68-year-old was arrested by US forces in August 2003.

In August 2007 an unidentified witness accused Majid of personally executing her two sons by tying bricks to their feet and throwing them out of helicopters into the Gulf after detaining them in March 1991.

Another witness, who also testified behind a curtain, said in September 2007 that Majid had overseen the execution of some 200 people in a sports stadium near the southern city of Basra, shooting them dead in batches of 25.

Majid has never denied or expressed remorse for his actions during the campaign against the Kurds, but he insisted he was not in Basra during the alleged massacre.

Since the March 2003 US-led invasion, experts have exhumed dozens of mass graves of victims killed in the two uprisings.

Saddam was hanged in December 2006 for his role in the massacre of 148 Shiite villagers in the southern town of Dujail in 1982.

Shiites, a minority in the Muslim world, comprise 60 percent of Iraq's population and were ruled for decades by Saddam's Sunni-led regime.