TV footage shows Hosni Mubarak in the courtroom cage in Cairo on Wednesday. (Reuters)

Cairo, Aug. 3: Hosni Mubarak was rolled into a courtroom cage in a hospital bed today to face trial for killing protesters — a seminal moment for an Arab world roiled by revolt.

The sheer symbolism of the day, covered live by television and watched by millions, made it one of the most visceral episodes in the Arab world, where uprisings have shaken the rule of authoritarian leaders.

In a region whose destiny was so long determined by rulers who deemed their people unfit to rule, one of those rulers was being tried by his public.

Even the most ardent in calling for his prosecution doubted until hours before the trial began that Mubarak, 83, would appear in a cage fashioned of bars and wire mesh, a reflection of the suspicion and unease that reigns in a country whose revolution remains unresolved.

The caged image thrilled those who overthrew him and must have chilled other autocrats facing popular uprisings in the region.

As a helicopter ferried him to the courtroom, housed in a police academy that once bore his name, cheers went up from a crowd gathered outside.

“The criminal is coming!” shouted Maged Wahba, a 40-year-old lawyer.

On this day, the aura of power — uncontested and distant — was made mundane, and Mubarak, the former President, dressed in white and bearing a look some read as disdain, was humbled.

“The first defendant, Mohammed Hosni al-Sayyid Mubarak,” the judge, Ahmed Rifaat, said, speaking to the cage holding Mubarak and his co-defendants — his two sons, Gamal and Alaa, former interior minister Habib el-Adly and six senior police officers.

“Sir, I am present,” Mubarak replied into a microphone, from his bed.

“You heard the charges that the prosecutor made against you,” the judge said from his podium in the wood-panelled courtroom. “What do you say?”

“I deny all these accusations completely,” he replied, wearily waving his hand.

With those words, the reverberations of those epic protests in Tahrir Square were incarnated in one man, Mubarak, who last appeared in public on February 10, when he uttered a phrase that suggested the heedlessness of absolute authority. “It’s not about me,” he said then, to the disbelief of hundreds of thousands demonstrating in his capital.

On this day, television captured him picking his nose. The two lines were the only words he uttered to the judge. Hard of hearing, Mubarak looked to his son to repeat the judge’s question to him.

As Mubarak denied the charges in the proceedings, which were broadcast on a huge television outside the police academy, his opponents gathered there roared in disapproval.

“Then who did it?” some asked.

The scene was tumultuous there in a sun-drenched parking lot, with a few dozen of Mubarak’s supporters sharing space with his opponents. At times, they scuffled; in intermittent clashes, the two sides threw rocks at each other. As Mubarak arrived in the courtroom, some of his supporters cried.

Those sentiments were overwhelmed by the denunciations of his critics, in a trial that, for a moment, seemed to represent all the frustrations and degradations of a state that treated its people as rabble. Someone was finally being held to account, many said.

“Today is a triumph over 30 years of tragedy,” said Fathi Farouk, a 50-year-old pharmacist who brought his family to watch the trial.

The trial has transfixed a turbulent Arab world, where autocrats in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain have all been challenged by rebellion. Some Arab officials have said the very spectacle of the trial would make those leaders all the more reluctant to step down.

On the very day Mubarak’s trial began, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria escalated his own crackdown on a city at the heart of the uprising against him.

But many gathered here said Arabs should take the opposite lesson from the proceedings. “All of the Arab world has to know that any leader who makes his people suffer will face this fate,” Farouk said. “From today, history will never be the same.”

Indeed, the country was awash with cries for justice, calls for vengeance and, not uncommon, expressions of regret for the fate of an old man who never seemed quite as loathsome as some of his contemporaries.

There was fascination at the spectacle itself. “I am dreaming,” said Hossam Mohammed, as he watched the trial. “Somebody pinch me.”

Today’s session lasted about four hours and was then adjourned until August 15. The charges can carry the death penalty.