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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Sentences returned against former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and six co-defendants in their trial for torturing and killing civilians are "null" and a "mockery" of justice, defense lawyers said Monday.
Hussein and two co-defendants were sentenced Sunday to be hanged, while four other defendants were sentenced to prison terms ranging up to life. One defendant was acquitted for lack of evidence.
Defense lawyers called the sentences politically motivated -- timed, they said, to "consolidate the electoral campaign of George W. Bush."
The lawyers also questioned the impartiality of the judges of the Iraqi High Criminal Court.
"Those judges revealed in more than one instance, and by more than one statement, that they are un-impartial, un-independent and biased against the president and his comrades," the defense lawyers' statement said.
The seven defendants were charged with crimes against humanity during a brutal 1982 crackdown on the Shiite town of Dujail after a failed assassination attempt on Hussein.
The crackdown included the executions of 148 males. According to court documents, the military, political and security apparatus in Iraq and Dujail killed, arrested, detained and tortured men, women and children in the town. Homes were demolished and orchards were razed.
The sentences were automatically appealed under Iraqi law.
Iraq's appeals court was expected to rule on Hussein's guilty verdict and death sentence by the middle of January, the chief prosecutor told The Associated Press Monday.
Iraq's three-man presidential council agreed at least six months ago not to block the death penalty for Hussein, should it be upheld on appeal, AP reported.
The defense statement called upon "all international, Arab and local bodies, parties, personalities and activists whether political or legal to adopt the necessary stand in order to put an end to this mockery."
Citing international legal opinions they say found flaws in the legal process faced by Saddam and the other defendants, the lawyers said the verdicts were fatally flawed and should be thrown out.
Public reaction in Iraq to the sentences split along sectarian lines, with Iraqis defying a curfew in Baghdad and spilling out onto the streets to celebrate the verdicts, while an estimated 2,000 Iraqis in Hussein's hometown of Tikrit took to the streets in protest.
Authorities began lifting the curfew on Monday.
Complete pedestrian curfews in Baghdad and the mainly Sunni provinces of Diyala and Salaheddin were lifted at 4 p.m. Monday local time, an official with the Iraqi Interior Ministry told CNN.
A vehicle ban is to be lifted at 6 a.m. Tuesday, the official said, but a daily curfew in the capital from 11 p.m. until 6 a.m. will remain in effect.
No information was available on when Baghdad airport will be reopened. The airport's closure also was part of security measures imposed prior to the sentencing.
Before the curfew was lifted, four mortar rounds landed on a residential area in a Sunni neighborhood in northern Baghdad around 3 p.m. Monday, wounding seven civilians, an official with Baghdad emergency police said.
The Associated Press reported that celebrations of the sentencing of the former dictator continued Monday in predominantly Shiite parts of the country, where there was no curfew -- along with pro-Hussein demonstrations among his fellow Sunnis.
Hussein is also in the middle of another trial involving the 1988 Anfal campaign, the government offensive in the country's Kurdish region. Hussein is charged in that case with genocide.
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