THE HAGUE - The trial of a Dutch businessman accused of aiding genocide by supplying ingredients for chemical weapons used by the Saddam Hussein regime in a 1988 massacre of Kurds is to begin here Monday.

Frans van Anraat, 63, who was arrested in December last year, is charged in connection with the poison gas attacks against the Kurdish town of Halabja in northern Iraq. Philipe Grant of the Swiss-based human rights organisation Trial Watch said Van Anraat is the first person to be tried for the slaughter. The Halabja massacre also features among the preliminary charges against Saddam.

According to the prosecution, Van Anraat supplied chemicals used in the attack, in which more than 5,000 people were killed. He is also accused in connection with chemical attacks on the northern Iraqi villages of Goktapa and Birjinni, and is charged with complicity in war crimes for supplying chemicals used in gas attacks on seven villages in Iran between 1986 and 1988. "The accused delivered, without scruples, the substances after 1984 (when an export ban of the specific chemicals was put into place), in quantities which rule out a normal use," Prosecutor Fred Teeven told a procedural hearing earlier this year.

According to the prosecutor the evidence will show that even after the widely publicized gas attack on Halabja in 1988, Van Anraat continued to supply chemical weapons materials to Iraq.

The materials allegedly included thiodiglycol and phosphor oxychloride, both described as ingredients for mustard and nerve gasses.

Van Anraat has not denied selling chemical components to Iraq, but always maintained that he was not aware of the use to which they were put. In a television interview in 2003 Van Anraat said he did not know Iraq used chemical weapons when he sold them the components.

"I knew later but by that time it was too late," he said then.

According to Dutch authorities, the US customs launched an investigation into his activities in the late 1980s, and concluded he was involved in four shipments of thiodiglycol from the United States to Europe in violation of export legislation.

He was arrested in 1989 in Italy on a US request but fled to Iraq, where he remained until US-led forces invaded the country in 2003, and then returned to the Netherlands, Dutch officials said.

For as yet unspecified reasons the United States in 2000 withdrew the request for his extradition, and Dutch authorities had no grounds for arresting him until charges of being an accomplice in genocide and war crimes were brought against him.

The trial is expected to take three weeks. A large number of witnesses will be called and victims of the alleged crimes will have the right to address the court.

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