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(Reuters) - Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was flown by helicopter to a courthouse on the outskirts of Cairo on Saturday for the start of his retrial over the killing of demonstrators in the 2011 uprising that overthrew him.
State television showed the 84-year-old being wheeled into the building lying on a hospital trolley wearing a white tracksuit. His arms were folded behind his head to prop him up.
Mubarak, former Interior Minister Habib al-Adli and four top aides are being retried for complicity in the murder of more than 800 protesters after the highest appeals court accepted appeals by both the defense and the prosecution in January. Two other senior interior ministry officials face lesser charges.
Mubarak's two sons, Alaa and Gamal, were also in court to be retried on separate charges of financial corruption.
It was the first time Mubarak had been seen in public since he and Adli were convicted last June on grounds of failing to stop the killing, rather than actually ordering it.
Prosecutors accuse Mubarak of giving orders to Adli to open fire with live ammunition against protesters to suppress demonstrations across Egypt, state news agency MENA said.
Mubarak and his interior minister were sentenced to life imprisonment at their first trial but the appeals court upheld complaints including weak evidence offered by the prosecution.
In a historic moment, Mubarak became the first ruler toppled by the Arab Spring uprisings to stand trial in person. His trial irked Gulf Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to which the former air force commander had been a loyal ally for decades.
The case exposed the difficulties of attaining justice in a country where the judiciary and security forces are still largely controlled by figures appointed during the Mubarak era.
The six senior Interior Ministry officials were acquitted. The prosecution complained that the ministry had failed to cooperate in providing evidence.
State television was broadcasting the trial live.
(Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Tom Perry and Louise Ireland)
Hosni Mubarak retrial for death of protesters postponed indefinitely
A retrial for the former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak has been adjourned indefinitely – victim of the same chaos and confusion that led to the guilty verdicts handed down in his first trial being quashed earlier this year.
Gamal (L) and Alaa (R), flank their father, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak inside the court room at the police academy during his trial in Cairo Photo: EPA
By Richard Spencer, Cairo
4:33PM BST 13 Apr 2013
A visibly more cheerful Mr Mubarak, 84, looked on from his courtroom cage on Saturday morning as lawyers for the families of the dead demanded the retrial judge, Mostafa Hassan Abdallah, step down.
They said he could not be impartial because he had presided over a trial that acquitted participants of one of the most famous acts of thuggery committed against protesters during the revolution against Mr Mubarak, the attack by tour guides mounted on horses and camels since called the Battle of the Camel.
Mr Mubarak faces charges of complicity in the killing of protesters against his rule at the start of the uprising in Tahrir Square in 2011
Judge Abdallah said he felt "unease" about handling the case, and referred it to a lower court. Lawyers involved began chanting: "The people want the execution of the president", while outside there was some stone-throwing between pro- and anti-Mubarak factions.
Mr Mubarak faces charges of complicity in the killing of protesters against his rule at the start of the uprising in Tahrir Square in 2011. He appeared in court alongside his former interior minister, Habib al-Adly, six police generals, and his sons Gamal and Alaa, who are accused of corruption.
Despite claims by his supporters that he has been seriously ill – the state news agency even reported him last year as being clinically dead – he was able to smile and wave from the courtroom cage from which the accused observe proceedings in local trials.
Overall the beginning of the retrial has lacked the drama involved in the first hearings in the case in August 2011, when the sole ruler of Egypt for 30 years was wheeled, sick-looking, in his hospital bed into the makeshift courthouse in the Police Academy once named after him in the desert outside Cairo.
That trial was widely condemned as incompetent, with prosecution witnesses often exonerating the accused and little apparent attempt to establish the precise details of how more than 800 people died during the revolution. It led to Mr Mubarak's conviction on a lesser charge of not doing enough to stop the killings. He and Mr Adly were sentenced to life, and the others acquitted.
Since then, Egypt has once again been rocked by protests, this time against Mr Mubarak's elected successor, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, and in particular the new more heavily Islamist constitution he has ushered in.
The economy is also on a nosedive, with government officials touring oil-rich regional states asking for cheap loans to prevent the currency and budget collapsing.
One campaign group has gone so far as to establish a petition calling for the reintroduction of military rule, said to have acquired almost a million names.
At a bus station near the courthouse, a small crowd claimed that Mr Mubarak should be freed immediately.
"If Mubarak is on trial Mohammed Morsi should be on trial too," said Ayoub Lawindi, an unemployed chef and a member of the Coptic Christian community, much of which claims it is being victimised under the Brotherhood.
"Every day we have people being killed. The crimes go on. He may have been elected but he made promises he didn't keep, and he approved a constitution suitable for Kandahar, not for Egypt."
Hany Kamal, 29, an electrical contractor, said he was unaware the retrial was even happening. "I thought that was all over with," he said. "Anyway, he's an old man, he should be allowed out. He was a good man. We used to live and eat and work, now there is no work."
The crowds outside the courthouse were also much smaller than for the first trial.
However, relatives of those killed have kept up an unremitting campaign for justice, and a display of faces of the largely young men shot down in the streets, most in the last few days of January 2011, remained on display.
"Mubarak should face what anybody else would face who killed a human being," said Sana'a al-Sayed, the body of whose 20-year-old son, Moaz, was photographed next to her, riddled with rubber pellet and bullet wounds. He was killed on January 28, the day protesters took over Tahrir Square.
"I ask for justice, nothing more than that. They are saying Mubarak is an old man and there should be mercy on him, but if any other old man killed someone, would they just leave him be? No, they would punish him."
