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AFP
Egypt started on Sunday the trial of dozens of democracy activists including Americans on charges of receiving illegal foreign funding, despite Washington's insistence that the charges be dropped.

A prosecutor in the court in a Cairo suburb read out the charges against the defendants, saying their alleged acceptance of the illicit funds had "detracted from the sovereignty of the Egyptian state."

They are also accused of operating their groups illegally.

Most of the 43 defendants did not show up in court. An AFP correspondent said the 14 defendants who did appear denied they had committed crimes when asked by the judge.

Each one answered the judge in Arabic, and one defendant told AFP during a recess that the defendants in the court's black metal cage were all Egyptian.

After the brief hearing, the judge adjourned the trial to April 26, allowing the defendants who had appeared in court released until then. The first hearings in Egyptian trials usually allow the defendants to register their pleas and lawyers to make their demands.

Judicial sources said that along with 19 Americans, the remaining defendants were Norwegian, German, Serbian, Egyptian, Palestinian and Jordanian.

An official with one of the targeted US groups, who requested anonymity, said that only seven of the American defendants are still in the country, the others apparently having left before a travel ban was imposed on the suspects.

Several of the American suspects have sought refuge in their country's embassy in Cairo, including Sam LaHood, son of US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood and head of the Egyptian chapter of the International Republican Institute.

Outside the courthouse, around 20 hardline Islamists staged a protest, holding banners of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric jailed after a terrorism conviction in the United States.

Egyptian citizen Nancy Okail, who heads the country's chapter of the US-based democracy advocacy group Freedom House, said before the hearing began that she would be in court.

"I want to stand for this battle. I don't think I have anything to hide," she told AFP.

The United States, the main foreign benefactor of Egypt's military rulers, has suggested that the trial of the activists may imperil that aid.

Washington provides about $1.3 billion annually in military aid to Cairo, in addition to development assistance.

A senior US administration official said in the Moroccan capital Rabat late on Saturday that "intense" talks were under way to resolve the issue of the democracy activists.

"Intense discussions (are being held) with the Egyptians to try to resolve the situation within days," the official said.

The other foreign non-governmental organisations targeted are the US-based International Centre for Journalists and the German Konrad-Adenauer Foundation.

Some of the groups had helped to train activists and political candidates to campaign for parliamentary elections that began last November, in Egypt's freest vote in decades.

US legislators and Egyptian activists say the trial is politically motivated.

Prosecutors, backed by police, raided the groups' offices in December, confiscating equipment and sealing their doors.

In a visit to Cairo last week, US Republican Senator John McCain said he was told by military ruler Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi that he was working "diligently" to resolve the issue.

But political intervention in the case would belie the authorities' claim they do not interfere with the independent judiciary, which already faces one of its greatest tests in the murder and corruption trial of ex-president Hosni Mubarak.