BAGHDAD, Iraq — A woman whose identity was kept secret and voice masked took the stand in the trial of Saddam Hussein today, testifying through tears that Saddam's men beat her as a teenager and forced her to take her clothes off.

Saddam sat stone-faced as the woman, identified only as "Witness A," told the court from behind a light blue curtain that she was taken into custody after the 1982 assassination attempt against the former Iraqi president in the town of Dujail.

The woman often cried during her testimony and repeatedly said she was forced to undress, implying that she had been raped but not saying so outright.

"I begged them, but they hit with their pistols," she said. "They made me put my legs up. There were five or more and they treated me like a banquet."

"Is that what happens to the virtuous woman that Saddam speaks about?" she wept, prompting the judge to advise her to stick to the facts.

The woman, who said she was 16 at the time of the Dujail incident, said Wadah al-Sheik, an Iraqi intelligence officer who died of cancer last month, ordered her to take off her clothes.

"He continued administering electric shocks and beating me," she said.

The measures taken to preserve the woman's anonymity complicated the testimony. At first, defense attorneys complained they could not hear her because of the voice distortion. Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin ordered the voice modulator shut off, but then the audience could not hear at all, so Amin ordered a recess, and the modulator was fixed, allowing the press and audience to hear.

Defense attorneys insisted on questioning the witness face to face and demanded that the defendants should also see her. So after she gave her testimony for over an hour, Amin ordered the session closed to the public, pulling screens in front of the press and visitors gallery and cutting the sound.

Amin said that defense attorneys would be told the identity of the witness but they must not pass the information to anyone outside the tribunal.

Saddam and seven co-defendants are on trial for the killing of more than 140 Shiites in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad and could be executed by hanging if convicted. Monday's session was a stormy one, as Saddam repeatedly stood to challenge the judge and witnesses.

But today, the ousted leader and his former officials sat largely silently, listening intently as Witness A spoke.

She described four years in Saddam's prisons after she and other families were swept up in Dujail following the shooting attack on Saddam's motorcade. She said she was held and tortured at a detention facility there before being taken to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. Later they were taken to a desert facility outside the southern city of Samawa.

At the Dujail facility, she said prisoners were given only bread and water.

"I could not even eat because of the torture," she said.

At Abu Ghraib, the guards stripped one of her male relatives, a deaf mute, and tied a rope to his genitalia, pulling him into the cells where the women were kept, she said.