CAIRO - Around 500 diehard supporters of Egypt’s ousted president Hosni Mubarak protested on Monday in Cairo city centre against any attempt by the authorities to prosecute him.
The demonstration came a day after the state prosecutor ordered Mubarak, who is under detention at a Red Sea resort hospital on suspicion of involvement in the deaths of protesters, transferred to a military hospital.
“We love you, president,” chanted protesters gathered outside the state television building, waving placards that read: “No to a Mubarak trial.”
“I don’t want the president to be put on trial. We forgive him, we love him,” one woman said.
Mubarak quit on February 11 after 18 days of massive popular protests against his 30-year autocratic rule.
Putting him on trial was a key demand of tens of thousands of protesters who staged mass demonstrations in Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square.
An official commission set up to investigate deaths during the protests said in a summary of its report released last week that 846 civilians and 26 policemen had died in the revolt. Most were shot in the head and chest.
Mubarak himself was complicit in the killings, according to the secretary general of the commission, who told reporters the president must have been consulted before the use of live fire against protesters was approved.
“Why think only of the bad things he did and not remember the good? We owe him a lot of good things,” a young man in the crowd said of the 82-year-old former president.
Police and troops cordoned off the protest as some 150 people held a counter-demonstration, chanting: “Revolution until victory.”
The two camps traded insults but the security presence prevented any clashes.
The military rulers who took over after Mubarak quit would like to move him eventually to Tora prison in Cairo, where his sons Gamal and Alaa and several ex-regime officials are jailed.
On Sunday prosecutor Abdel Maguid Mahmud’s office said a medical team he sent to the Sharm el-Sheikh hospital determined that Mubarak was “in stable condition with medical treatment.”
Mubarak was first remanded in custody on April 13, and on Friday the state news agency reported that his detention was renewed for another 15 days amid a probe into the deadly crackdown on protesters and corruption.
