CAIRO: His arm in a sling and his head bandaged, Mohamed Morsi, still mourning his son, looked across the room at the cage that held Egypt’s fallen dictator Hosni Mubarak and cursed, almost under his breath. "May God burn his heart."
Minutes earlier, a prosecutor listed some of the roughly 850 names of victims who, like Morsi’s son, died during the revolt that deposed Mubarak, and then judge Ahmed Refaat turned to the ex-president and asked him for his plea.
Mubarak, in a stretcher, and obscured by his two sons and co-defendants who stood at the front of the black metal cage where the defendants were penned, responded in a strangled voice: "All these charges, I completely deny."
Until the minute his medical helicopter landed, there was still disbelief Mubarak would appear in the cage.
But there he was, the once proud leader lying weak on a stretcher, hair dyed black in defiance of his 83 years, his arm over his face one moment, hands behind his head another, seething quietly as lawyers hurled indignities at him.
"God gives sovereignty to whom he pleases, and takes away sovereignty from whom he pleases. God glorifies whom he wills, and he humiliates whom he wills," one of the victims’ lawyers, quoting the Quran, Islam’s holy book, recited to the judge.
It was an epic downfall, unthinkable just six months ago, a once absolute ruler now a caged infirm.
A friend of a man who was injured during the January and February revolt said he felt sorry for the former president.
"I feel sympathy for him," said the man, who gave his name as Zurin Fadel, during a court recess.
"It’s insulting for this happen to someone like the president," he said.
Mubarak’s sons tried to spare him the embarrassment of the prying camera airing the trial live to 80-million Egyptians, more used to seeing him in flattering posters or striding purposely along world leaders.
And the security arrangements seemed calculated to shield the ex-president as much as possible.
His cage in the corner, shared by his two sons, former interior minister Habib El-Adly and six former police commanders, was surrounded by plainclothes guards and the nearby benches filled by tired police conscripts, all enclosed by yet more metal mesh fencing.
"That’s the point," said a police general when reporters complained that they could not clearly see the defendants from their seats.
But the trial was surprisingly transparent in another sense, plodding along for almost four hours as the judge considered lawyers’ requests for witness lists and documents.
Morsi, who was wounded on Monday when soldiers and police cleared a protest by activists and relatives of the revolt’s victims, said he was heartened by the proceedings, but said all that counted was the verdict.
"The people who killed our children must be jailed. They must be executed," he said.
