CAIRO, Jan 13: An Egyptian court on Sunday ordered a retrial for former president Hosni Mubarak after accepting an appeal against the life sentence handed him for his involvement in the deaths of protesters in 2011.

Mr Mubarak, 84, his two sons Mr Alaa and Mr Gamal, his former interior minister Habib Al Adly and top security chiefs will face a new trial, the Court of Cassation, the top appeals court, ruled after a very brief hearing.

The ruling was met with cries of “Long live justice!” by Mubarak supporters who held up the former strongman’s picture and hugged each other in the courtroom, with dozens more outside shouting “We love you, president!” Mr Mubarak, his sons and Mr Adly will remain in jail, however, as they still face separate cases.

Judge Ahmed Ali Abdelrahman told the court he had accepted the appeals by Mr Mubarak, Mr Adly and the prosecution, thereby cancelling all previous rulings by the Cairo criminal court.A date has still to be set for the new trial, judicial sources said.

Sunday’s ruling was “expected after a flawed and disappointing trial,” prominent rights group, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) said in a statement.

Hosni Mubarak’s epic fall from grace, from the dictatorial head of the Arab World’s most populous nation to a defendant behind bars, was for many a promising sign that the revolution that toppled him was on the right track.

But the case against the former president was not convincing, with patchwork evidence and prosecution witnesses exonerating the defendants, legal experts said.

“The trial was a disappointment since the start of investigations and until the verdict. Despite popular optimism that justice was close... what we saw were superficial interrogations marred by negligence,” said Hoda Nasrallah, a lawyer with EIPR.

The biggest shock, she said, was that the verdict cleared the security services of any responsibility and found no one directly guilty of the killings.

EIPR urged the new court to “avoid the mistakes” of the first court hearing and called for the guarantee of a fair trial.

Sunday’s ruling comes less than two weeks before the second anniversary of the start of the popular uprising that unseated Mr Mubarak and paved the way for the election of the country’s first Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi.

On June 2, Mr Mubarak and Mr Adly were sentenced to life in prison for failing to prevent the deaths of over 800 protesters during the 18-day uprising that began on Jan 25, 2011.

Six security officials on trial in the same case were acquitted at the time.—AFP