BAGHDAD, Iraq — A former judge from Saddam Hussein's regime acknowledged sentencing 148 Shiites to death in the 1980s but insisted that they were given a proper trial and had confessed to trying to assassinate the former Iraqi leader.

The question of the Shiites' prosecution is a key point in the trial of Saddam Hussein and seven former members of his regime.

The eight are charged with killing the Shiites, as well as illegal imprisonment and torture of hundreds of others — including women and children — in a crackdown launched against the town of Dujail following a 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam.

Saddam has admitted that he ordered the trial of the 148 before his Revolutionary Court. But he said he had the right to do so because they were accused in the attempt to kill him.

Prosecutors have said the trial was "imaginary," that the 148 did not even appear before the Revolutionary Court that sentenced them to death.

YANGON, Myanmar — Myanmar reported its first case of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, and there was a high risk poultry in Afghanistan were also infected, officials said Monday, a day after the virus gained new ground in Europe and Africa.The Cameroon government announced its first case on Sunday, becoming the fourth African country to be struck by the virus. New cases were also reported Sunday in Poland and Greece — two countries already touched by bird flu — in the latest signs of the disease's expanding range.In Afghanistan, meanwhile, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said that an H5 subtype of bird flu was found in poultry samples in Kabul and Jalalabad, and that there was a "high risk" further tests could prove the samples to be the H5N1 strain.