Glass cage mutes Morsi at Egypt trial

In court for second time since ouster, ex-president defiant but is held in check

Former President Mohammed Morsi stands Tuesday inside a glass-encased metal cage in a courtroom in Cairo in this image taken from Egyptian state TV. Morsi was separated from other defendants.
Former President Mohammed Morsi stands Tuesday inside a glass-encased metal cage in a courtroom in Cairo in this image taken from Egyptian state TV. Morsi was separated from other defendants.

CAIRO - Mohammed Morsi, the deposed Egyptian president, appeared in public Tuesday for the second time since his detention after the military takeover in July, this time locked in a soundproof glass cage as the defendant at a criminal trial.

The installation of the cage, a novelty in Egyptian courts, underscored the extent of the effort by the new government to silence the former president and his fellow defendants, about 20 fellow leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. It dominated the courtroom debate, with lawyers for the defendants arguing that it deprived the accused of their right to hear or participate in their own trial and with supporters of the government crediting the soundproof barrier with preserving order in the court.

“The glass cage was the hero of today’s trial,” Egyptian state television declared.

For his first appearance, at another trial in the same makeshift courtroom in November, Morsi insisted on wearing a dark business suit instead of the customary white prison jumpsuit and then shouted from the nonsound proof cage that he was the elected president and the victim of a coup, and his fellow defendants shut down the trial by chanting against military rule.

Appearing Tuesday in ordinary prison dress, Morsi paced his cage angrily and bided his time for a chance to speak again. When the judge turned on the microphone so that Morsi could acknowledge his presence, he shouted out, “I am the president of the republic, and I’ve been here since 7 in the morning sitting in this dump,” according to an account on a Brotherhood website that was confirmed by people who had been present.

“Who are you?” Morsi asked the judge, “Do you know where I am?”

He insisted he did not recognize the court’s authority to try him, in part since it was outside the constitutional procedures for impeaching a president.

The judge, Shaaban el-Shamy, shot back: “I am the president of Egypt’s criminal court!” He turned off the microphone in Morsi’s cage, and the ousted president was silenced.

The other Islamist leaders on trial in the same case were kept in a separate glass cage, presumably to prevent communication. At times, they turned their backs to the court in defiance. When the microphone was on so the judge could ask a question, they returned to chanting against military rule.

Egyptian state television canceled plans to broadcast the session shortly before it began, ultimately showing only limited clips later in the day. No other news organization was allowed to report live from inside the court.

Morsi, who was chosen as Egypt’s first elected president in June 2012, was removed from office a year later in a military takeover after widespread street protests. The new government installed by military chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi described Morsi’s removal as a second revolution, after the 2011 revolt that ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

The military held Morsi and his top advisers incommunicado for months after the army removed him from office. Prosecutors later began filing charges against them, including several punishable by death.

In his first trial, which began in November, Morsi and others Brotherhood leaders were accused of inciting their supporters to kill protesters in street fights against their opponents outside the presidential palace in December 2012. (The police had refused to protect the Brotherhood from attackers, and the Brotherhood asked its civilian supporters to do it themselves.)

On Tuesday, Morsi and the other defendants faced other charges related to his escape from prison during the 2011 revolt, when he and other Brotherhood leaders were held in extralegal detention because of their opposition to Mubarak. They are now accused of conspiring with foreign militant movements,including the Sunni Islamist Palestinian group Hamas and the Shiite group Hezbollah, to break themselves out.

There are 130 defendants besides Morsi, but only 19 appeared with him Tuesday. The other 111 defendants, including members of Hamas and Hezbollah, are being tried in absentia.

Many rights advocates consider the charges implausible. None of the foreign militant leaders named in the case was present for the trial, and at least one of the defendants from Hamas was deceased at the time while a third was in an Israeli jail, according to news reports from that time, as well as Hamas.

Morsi and his Brotherhood colleagues were arrested on Jan. 27, 2011, the eve of what became known as the “Friday of Rage,” and were sent to prison to undercut the protests against Mubarak.

Authorities say up to 800 foreign militants, including others from Lebanon’s Hezbollah, then entered Egypt to help free their own prisoners in Egyptian jails.

Two days later, in some of the still-unclear events of the uprising, there appeared to be an attempt to spread chaos when several prisons in Egypt were stormed, some by men with bulldozers.

There was a widespread belief at the time that the police freed prisoners to create the pandemonium. Rights groups have recorded a number of incidents when prison riots ended up with police killing a number of inmates to quell the mayhem. The groups have called for an independent investigation into events of the day.

Nasser Amin, a rights lawyer on the board of the National Council for Human Rights appointed by the interim authorities, said the investigation of Morsi and his allies was building long before he was ousted from office.

But Amin called the case weak, like the trials of Mubarak and other former regime officials. He said the Egyptian judicial system is not prepared to handle such political cases.

“How are they going to prove that Morsi tried to undermine the Egyptian state?” he said.

After removing Morsi, the new government began a widening crackdown on his Islamist supporters. Security forces have killed more than 1,000 people at protests against the takeover and jailed thousands more, including almost all of the Brotherhood’s top leaders. The government has shut down virtually all the Egyptian news media sympathetic to the group. In December, it branded the Brotherhood as a terrorist group.

In response to the takeover, there has been an escalating series of attacks on security forces, with two more inside the capital Tuesday. Two gunmen on a motorcycle assassinated Gen. Mohamed Said, a senior Interior Ministry official, near his home in an area across the Nile River from Cairo, state media reported.

Later, gunmen killed a policeman outside a Coptic Christian church in a suburb of Cairo, state news media reported.

In September, militants attempted to assassinate the interior minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, by detonating a car bomb near his motorcade. In November, gunmen killed Lt. Col. Mohamed Mabrouk, of the Interior Ministry division monitoring Islamist groups, in the Nasr City neighborhood of greater Cairo. And last weekend, on the eve of the anniversary of the uprising, four bombs exploded near police positions around Cairo, killing at least six people.

The Sinai-based militant group Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis claimed responsibility for the killing Tuesday of the police general. It has claimed responsibility for most of the major attacks, including the biggest bombing over the weekend and the attempted assassination of the interior minister.

Information for this article was contributed by David D. Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh of The New York Times and by Sarah El Deeb and Laura Dean of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 01/29/2014

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