The trial of Hosni Mubarak adjourned to Wednesday after several witnesses testified for the first time The trial of Hosni Mubarak has been adjourned until Wednesday after several witnesses testified for the first time in the trial of the ousted president. Relatives of protesters killed during Egypt revolution scuffled with police and tried to force their way into a Cairo courtroom yesterday, demanding to be allowed to attend the latest session in the trial of ousted President Hosni Mubarak.
Live TV broadcasts of the trial have been halted by a judge's order, and family members massed outside the courtroom were angered they could not witness the prosecution of the former leader charged with complicity in their loved ones' deaths.
The 83-year-old Mubarak, who is in ill health, was shown on state TV being wheeled on a gurney from a helicopter that landed in the Police Academy on Cairo's outskirts, where the court has been set up. He shielded his face from the sun as he was taken into an ambulance to deliver him to the session. In the courtroom, he lay in a hospital bed in the defendants' cage along with his co-defendants, including his two sons.
Outside the academy compound, hundreds of victims' families and protesters pushed and shoved in an attempt to break through the main gates and enter the court building. Black-clad anti-riot police swung batons and briefly clashed with the protesters, who hurled stones at the security forces. TV footage also showed metal barricades being thrown, while hundreds of anti-riot police chased young men in the streets.
Later, a senior police witness told the court, trying Mubarak and his interior minister Habib Al Adly, that they had not ordered firing on protesters during a revolt earlier this year.
General Hussain Musri, the head of the Interior Ministry's telecommunications department at the time of the popular uprising, told the court that instructions to police forces were to use tear gas and water cannons against the anti-Mubarak protests when they started on January 25.
Musri, who was in the Interior Ministry's operations room during the revolt that eventually unseated Mubarak, said that the then chief of the anti-riot police Ahmad Ramzy ordered "on his own" this branch of security forces be armed with live ammunition when he received information that protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo were planning to attack the nearby headquarters of the Interior Ministry.
The anti-riot police, known in Egypt as the Central Security troops, are usually armed with batons and tear gas. Ramzy is one of six senior policemen being tried alongside Mubarak and Al Adly on chages of involvement in a deadly crackdown on protesters.
Lawyers have justified the officers’ actions as a gesture of gratitude to Mubarak for his support for a US-led coalition that expelled Iraq from Kuwait in 1991.
Mubarak's sons - Alaa and Gamal, Habib el-Adly - the former interior minister, and six senior police officers are also on trial