CAIRO — An Egyptian judge Saturday named top security officials to testify in the retrial of former President Hosni Mubarak on charges related to the killings of about 900 protesters during the 2011 uprising that led to his ouster.
The 85-year-old longtime autocrat’s previous conviction for failing to stop the killings was overturned on appeals last month, leaving open questions about who ordered the use of deadly force against protesters and who carried out those orders.
The naming of former prison and top intelligence officials in the case appeared to intertwine Mubarak’s trial with accusations facing his successor, Mohammed Morsi, who was ousted in a coup July 3 just one year after his election.
Morsi, who has since been held at an undisclosed military facility, is being investigated on allegations that he and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders conspired with the Palestinian Hamas group in the neighboring Gaza Strip to escape from prison during the anti-Mubarak uprising.
That allegation was raised again in court Saturday by defense lawyers who suggested that Hamas militants were behind the attacks on prisons and police stations in the northern Sinai Peninsula, which borders Gaza.
Mubarak, who ruled over the Arab world’s most populous country for nearly 30 years, grinned and waved at supporters as he was pushed in his wheelchair into the defendants’ courtroom cage Saturday.
Unlike previous court sessions, in which the former president was lying on a gurney, Mubarak appeared healthier and more confident as he sat upright in what was his second court appearance since his release from a prison hospital last month. He remains in detention at a military hospital pending corruption charges.
Judge Mahmoud el-Rachidi ordered a media blackout of the next three court sessions, scheduled to run Oct. 19-21, citing national security reasons. The sessions will include testimony from ex-police chief Ahmed Gamal Eddin and ex-intelligence czar Murad Muwafi, who was also a governor in Sinai during the 18-day uprising in 2011.
Elsewhere in Egypt, thousands of Brotherhood supporters protested in scattered rallies Saturday to mark the one-month anniversary of the killing of more than 600 people when security forces cleared out two pro-Morsi sit-ins in Cairo.
