Cairo: Wheeled out of an iron cage after he was sentenced to life in prison, the former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stayed silent as tears rolled down his face from behind his dark glasses.
“He lost his temper when Jamal [his younger son] approached him to soothe him,” said a police officer on guard at the Police Academy where the verdict was delivered against Mubarak.
“Mubarak shouted at Jamal, ‘Leave me alone’ before he covered his face with a sheet until he was carried into an ambulance,” added the officer who asked not to be named for being not authorised to speak to the media.
When boarded on a military helicopter from the Police Academy on the outskirts of Cairo, Mubarak, 84, thought he was on his way to a luxury army medical centre where he had stayed since August. He was in shock when he learnt that the plane was heading to Turah, a prison complex, on the southern outskirts of Cairo.
The country’s chief prosecutor Abdul Majid Mahmoud on Saturday ordered Mubarak be transported to the prison hospital to serve his jail term. For more than three hours after the plane landed in the prison, Mubarak refused to be taken down.
“He was in tears as he murmured, “I served this country throughout my life. I put my trust in God,” the local media reported on Sunday quoting unidentified prison officials. He suffered a heart attack and was treated aboard the plane, according to the report.
Repeated attempts by his bodyguards and prison officials failed to convince him into leaving the plane. At last, Mubarak, apparently concluding that his obstinacy was of no good, agreed to get off.
He was wheeled inside the prison hospital where he spent his first night in an intensified care unit, whose renovation cost an estimated 4.5 million Egyptian pounds (Dh2.7 million). The unit, originally two rooms rebuilt into one, is located near a garden where security is tightened.
His two sons, Ala’a and Jamal, remanded in the same prison, were allowed to visit him on Saturday, according to sources inside the high-security prison.
Pharoah in prison blue
Mubarak, often called Egypt’s last pharaoh, has received the prison blue uniform and registered as an inmate, said the sources.
Ruling Egypt for nearly 30 years until toppled in a popular revolt in February last year, Mubarak was on Saturday convicted along with his interior minister Habib Al Adly of complicity in killing 846 protesters. Both men have the right to appeal.
Their sentencing can be commuted, if their appeals are accepted, on the grounds that the presiding judge, Ahmad Refaat, who gave them the verdict, acquitted six former security aides for lack of evidence, according to legal experts
“The court found Mubarak and Al Adly guilty apparently for failing to take the required measures in their capacity as the president and the interior minister, to protect the peaceful protesters,” said Medhat Kamal, a law professor.
“But it cleared the six other defendants because it [the court] was not convinced, due to lack of evidence and witnesses, that they had ordered firing on the protesters,” he told Gulf News.
According to him, Mubarak has still a chance to be freed on health grounds due to his old age or get a pardon from the next president. Mubarak’s opponents are worried that his last prime minister, Ahmad Shafiq, a finalist in this week’s presidential run-offs, will pardon him if he becomes a president.
