CAIRO — Toppled former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi stood alone in a soundproof, glass-encased metal cage at the start of a new trial Tuesday, wearing a white prison uniform, pacing and shouting angrily at the judge in apparent disbelief: “Who are you? Tell me!”
Morsi is on trial with 130 others, including Muslim Brotherhood leaders, and militants from the Palestinian Hamas group and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, on charges related to the prison breaks at the height of the 18-day 2011 uprising against his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak.
After five hours, the trial was adjourned until Feb. 22.
As Morsi was being tried, his supporters clashed with police in central Cairo.
In two separate attacks, gunmen also killed an aide to the country’s interior minister in a drive-by shooting outside Cairo and a policeman guarding a church in a southern section of the capital.
The former Islamist president, ousted in a popularly backed July 3 coup, declared to the judge that he remains Egypt’s legitimate leader, according to a state television reporter inside the courtroom.
Morsi was the only defendant separated in his own cell.
In a half-hour of recorded footage aired on state television, he protested being in a cage.
Raising his hands in the air and angrily questioning why he was in the court, Morsi yelled in apparent disbelief, “Do you know where I am?” and asked the judge who he was.
Judge Shabaan el-Shami responded, “I am the head of Egypt’s criminal court!”
It was the second time Morsi has appeared in court since the coup.
At his first appearance, in November, he wore a trim, dark suit and appeared far less agitated, although he interrupted the judge and gave long speeches, declaring forcefully that he was “the president of the republic.”
Authorities apparently resorted to glass-encased cages to muffle some defendants’ outbursts, which disrupted the previous hearing. The judge controls the microphone to the cage.
Prosecutors in the case demanded the maximum penalty for the defendants.
“These acts were committed with the terrorist aim of terrifying the public and spreading chaos,” a prosecutor told the court. He said Morsi and other leading Brotherhood members plotted with foreign groups to “undermine the Egyptian state and its institutions.”
The hearing was held amid heavy security at a police-academy complex in eastern Cairo.
Protests by Morsi supporters were scheduled to mark the third anniversary of the so-called “Friday of Rage,” in which protesters and police clashed for hours in 2011 before police withdrew from the streets and the military was deployed.