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“Once one of the accused on the Dujail case, for example, has been sentenced to death, then he won’t be tried on other charges,” Moussawi said in an interview. “Other charges will automatically be dropped against that particular defendant, even if the case itself is brought against others.”

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Moussawi was reluctant to be drawn on how long the Dujail case, which began four months ago against Saddam and seven co-defendants, would take but said it had “passed the 75% mark”.

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A panel of nine judges had already been selected to hear any appeal and the process was unlikely to take more than a month, he said. Under Iraqi law it was not possible for a death sentence imposed on anyone — including the former president — to be commuted.

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The prosecutor’s comments will be welcomed by many Shi’ites and Kurds exasperated by the slow pace of the trial and by its accelerating descent into farce as the accused repeatedly hurl insults at the judges.

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However, abandoning other trials that might shed light on Saddam’s role in atrocities ranging from a poison gas attack that killed 5,000 Kurds at Halabja in 1988 to the brutal suppression of a Shi’ite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991 may dismay the relatives of those who died. Many are desperate to know about the events that destroyed their lives.

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According to one Kurdish group that searches for missing people, some women consider themselves still engaged to fiancés who vanished decades ago, while many married women cannot accept they have become widows.

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Prosecutors selected the massacre — carried out in the predominantly Shi’ite town of Dujail — for the first case against Saddam because it appeared easier to prove than those involving wider allegations of genocide.

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The 140 allegedly killed were accused of taking part in a botched attempt to assassinate Saddam when he visited their village 40 miles north of Baghdad in 1982. Many more were tortured.

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According to government officials, retaliation against the villagers was led by Barzan al-Tikriti, a half-brother of Saddam who was head of intelligence, and by Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice-president. They are also on trial.

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However, the case has not proceeded as smoothly as prosecutors hoped. Although 26 witnesses have given heart-wrenching accounts of torture and imprisonment during the crackdown, proving that Saddam was directly responsible has been difficult.