Egypt’s Future at Stake in Islamic Militants’ Trial : Mideast: The defendants’ spiritual leader fled to New York. A suspect in the World Trade Center bombing is an apparent follower.

In a cavernous exhibition hall filled with armed soldiers and the sound of bird songs in the rafters, a single bearded man stood in front of a panel of judges Saturday, on trial for his life.

“The West wants to eliminate . . . the ability of Muslims to protect themselves and calls it terrorism,” Safwat Abdel-Ghani, accused of masterminding two of Egypt’s most visible political assassinations, told the court. “Their wish is to keep religion away from society. This unfortunately is what is happening now, and because of it, my heart is breaking.”

One of the judges stared in silent contemplation. A second wiped his eyes in fatigue. The third nodded, started, nodded again, and slowly his chin dropped to his chest, where it stayed.

Suddenly, from a bank of giant cages along the side of the room, where 16 other defendants sat quietly or stood listening with their fingers laced through the wire, a young bearded man climbed onto a bench, raised his hands to his ears and began singing the words of the Muslims’ timeless call to prayer.

From the audience, wives and mothers of the defendants, swathed in black, laid down their babies on the benches and filed out of the room to pray. The defendants turned toward the eastern walls of their cages and began bowing to the floor. Several police officers fidgeted at their seats. The judges waited silently until the ritual was over.

It might be a movie set from hell, this drafty convention hall-turned-courtroom where in an eerie routine the contest for Egypt’s future--and perhaps the future of much of the Muslim world--is being played out between Islamic militants seeking to turn the country into a Muslim fundamentalist state and the forces of a government seeking to hold back the rising religious current that is sweeping the Middle East.

On trial are 17 young militants of the Gamaa al Islamiya, the underground organization whose spiritual leader, Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, has fled to New York, where one of his apparent followers has been implicated in the bombing of the World Trade Center.

The trial entered one of its most decisive periods Saturday with Abdel-Ghani’s personal address, and tensions throughout Egypt have mounted in recent days, as both Islamic militants and the government moved to raise the stakes in a confrontation that increasingly is drawing the United States and Europe into its troubled core.

On Friday, Gamaa al Islamiya warned in a statement faxed to news agencies that it was preparing to target foreign residents and foreign businesses in Egypt as part of its war with the government that already has seen foreign tourists subject to violent attacks.

The group said it was also warning foreign investors to liquidate their assets in Egypt, “since the slogan ‘Investment, but Not Investors’ might become a future call for our legitimate retribution.”

The statement asserted responsibility for the fatal shooting last weekend of a police lieutenant and his 8-year-old son in southern Egypt, alleging that the officer had been responsible for the deaths of “more than 20 young Muslim men” over the past several months.

The government responded with new indictments against 49 Islamic militants suspected of carrying out the recent attacks against foreign tourists, though Interior Ministry officials warned that at least six of the defendants are not in custody. “This indictment does not mean the organization has been destroyed,” Maj. Gen. Mohamed Abdallah, who signed the indictments, told reporters.

Abdel-Ghani, 30, accused of plotting the 1990 assassination of Parliament Speaker Rifaat Mahgoub, also faces separate charges of masterminding, from behind prison walls, the killing last year of noted secularist writer Farag Foda, a critic of the Islamic trend in Egypt.

Speaking from behind bars in the courtroom during a break, the bearded, white-robed defendant insisted Gamaa al Islamiya was not behind the World Trade Center bombing, which he condemned.

“This is not a good act, and we do not know the motives behind this act. Because killing innocent people in Islam is not permitted,” he said.

Abdel-Ghani has denied responsibility for the killing of the former Parliament leader, who was sprayed with gunfire while in his motorcade by a passing motorcyclist in front of a luxury hotel.

But he said Mahgoub’s refusal to consider implementing Sharia, or Islamic law, in Egypt was an indication that he had renounced his religion. “I say whatever the Sharia would say: Whoever has renounced his religion has to be killed,” he said.

Abdel-Ghani, like other Islamic militants on trial this year in Egypt, could face hanging if convicted, though Egypt, perhaps fearing violent reprisals, has not executed any condemned political defendants in recent years.

“I don’t care about the verdicts, whatever they are. Whether I am condemned to death or judged to be free, they are equal to me,” he said. “Sometimes when you’re condemned to death, it is more honorable than being judged innocent.”