BAGHDAD, Iraq – A combative Saddam Hussein lectured the judge and lashed out at his treatment by American “occupiers” as his murder trial resumed yesterday and then adjourned for a week to allow a co-defendant to replace a murdered lawyer.

The televised hearing lasted less than three hours but was long on drama. The chief of Saddam’s revolutionary court, defendant Awad Hamed Bandar, complained of death threats. A Baath Party official in Dujail, Mohammed Ali Azzawi, claimed that doctors were injecting him with poison. A third, Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, demanded treatment for cancer.

Throughout the second day of proceedings, Saddam took notes on a legal pad and at times interrupted lead judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin. When Judge Amin came back from a recess, Saddam refused to stand until the judge admonished him to do so.

Chief Prosecutor Jaafar Mousawi pleaded with the bench to start calling witnesses to the crime – the murders of 146 people following a 1982 assassination attempt on Saddam in the village of Dujail. It is the first of at least a dozen cases for which the former leader could be tried by the Iraqi High Tribunal.

But after hearing videotaped testimony from just one witness, Judge Amin adjourned the trial until next Monday to give a former vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, time to find new counsel.

One of Mr. Ramadan’s lawyers was killed and another was wounded in a drive-by shooting in the Iraqi capital three weeks ago, and yesterday he rejected a court-appointed substitute.

Two hours before yesterday’s session, a mortar landed harmlessly in the fortified Green Zone where Saddam’s old Baath Party headquarters has been turned into a courtroom. Reporters and others entering the building had to undergo multiple inspections.

The trial has proven a divisive undertaking in Iraq, with Shiite Muslims and Kurds approving of the process and Sunni Arabs condemning it. Hundreds of people in a mostly Shiite village, Dujail, demonstrated yesterday in favor of Saddam’s conviction and execution, while Sunnis in his hometown, Tikrit, rallied in his favor.

Defense lawyers contend that the tribunal, founded under an American occupation decree and recognized only last month by Iraq’s interim National Assembly, is illegal under a Geneva Convention statute forbidding occupy ing powers from creating courts.

To help make that case, the defense team brought a former American attorney general, Ramsey Clark, and a former Qatari justice minister, Najib Nauimi, into court as advisers. They were shown on TV but their Iraqi colleagues were not – a move aimed at protecting the Iraqis from attacks.

Mr. Nauimi tried to read a written challenge to the court’s legitimacy and a statement from Mr. Clark about security. The judge cut him off, saying those issues would be addressed later.

Saddam came ready to test the judge and provided much of the theatrics, as he did on the trial’s first day.

Wearing a dark gray suit and cradling a Koran under his right arm, the deposed leader swaggered into the room behind the other defendants six minutes after a bailiff had shouted his name. To those around him, he uttered a traditional Arabic greeting, “Peace be upon the people of peace.” During a break, he joked with guards.

When the judge asked him to sign papers giving Messrs. Clark and Nauimi power of attorney, the former president seized the moment to deliver a Koranic verse and a litany of protest.

The only witness heard yesterday was an intelligence officer who was sent to Dujail in 1982 to investigate the attempt on the president’s life, Wadah Ismail Sheik. Sheik, 54, died of lung cancer last month, four days after court officials had videotaped his testimony in a Baghdad hospital.

Sheik said he received no instructions from Saddam. The president’s half-brother and intelligence chief, Mr. Hasan, “was the one directly giving the orders,” the witness said.