As my colleagues David Kirkpatrick and Mayy el-Sheikh report, Egypt’s deposed president, Mohamed Morsi, appeared in court on Monday to face charges of inciting the murder of protesters, his first public appearance since his removal from office in July.
Video of Mr. Morsi and other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in the courtroom was broadcast on state television and widely shared online.
As the Brotherhood’s official Twitter feed noted, Mr. Moris and the other leaders of the movement flashed the four-finger hand sign that has become a symbol of their resistance to the military-installed government since the killing of hundreds of protesters outside the Rabaa mosque in Cairo in August. (The mosque takes its name from the Arabic word for the number four.)
The Reuters correspondent Hadeel Al-Shalchi noted that Mr. Morsi wore a grey suit, rather than the prison-issue white track suits worn by the other leading Islamists in the caged dock alongside him.
As the Egyptian blogger who writes on Twitter as @GalalAmrG noted, Cairo’s Tahrir Square was completely sealed off as the president elected after Hosni Mubarak was forced from power by a sit-in there in 2011 went on trial himself.
Even still, the same blogger explained, Morsi supporters did rally on the streets of the Egyptian capital, and were even served by equal-opportunity street vendors selling images of the deposed president, along with the army chief who forced him from power, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi.
The Cairene blogger Zeinobia gathered images and video of the pro-Morsi protests, which devolved into clashes with his opponents, posted online by journalists in a comprehensive live blog.
Islam Abdel-Rahman, a leader of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, shared an overhead image of one rally along the Nile, and a second photograph of what he called Egypt “under occupation†by its own military.
