The judges also sentenced Mr. Mubarak’s feared former interior minister, Habib el-Adly, to the same penalty for the same reason. But they dismissed corruption charges against Mr. Mubarak and his deeply unpopular sons, Alaa and Gamal, on technical grounds.
By nightfall, demonstrators filled Tahrir Square in a protest that matched the size and ideological diversity of the early days of the revolt, with Islamists and liberals once again protesting side by side. Protesters poured into the streets of Alexandria, Suez and other cities to rail against what they saw as a miscarriage of justice.
“It is all an act. It is a show,” said Alaa Hamam, 38, a Cairo University employee joining a protest in Tahrir Square, the symbolic heart of the uprising. “It is a provocation.”
For many Egyptians, the court’s handling of the case was the latest disappointment in a 16-month-old transition that has yielded some major accomplishments, but has not yet delivered the ratification of a constitution, the election of a president or the hand-over of power by interim military rulers.
Against an opaque backdrop of military rule, in which the generals, prosecutors and judges were all appointed by Mr. Mubarak, the degree of judicial independence is impossible to know. Demonstrators slammed the decision as a ruse designed to placate them without holding anyone accountable for the violence or corruption of the old government.
The ruling immediately became a political battleground in Egypt’s first competitive presidential race, expected to be decided this month by a runoff between the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood and Ahmed Shafik, Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister. Most analysts called the decision a blow to Mr. Shafik because of his close ties to Mr. Mubarak, but any further protests could increase public receptiveness to Mr. Shafik’s law-and-order message.
Mr. Mubarak’s conviction and court appearance — on a hospital gurney in the metal cage that holds criminal defendants in Egypt — offered the kind of vivid example of the humiliation of their once-invincible ruler that thrilled Egyptians with a feeling of liberation.
Mr. Mubarak, in dark glasses and a light-colored track suit, showed no reaction to the verdict.
Both sons stood in front of their father to try to shield him from the cameras. Alaa Mubarak appeared to recite verses from the Koran as the verdict was read. And after the ruling, both sons had tears in their eyes. They remain in jail while they face charges in an unrelated stock-manipulation case announced last week.
During the trial, Mr. Mubarak was housed in a military hospital, where he enjoyed visits from his family and a daily swim, according to news reports. After the verdict, a helicopter flew him to a Cairo prison.
State news media reported that after complaining of a “medical crisis,” Mr. Mubarak was treated in the helicopter on the ground, then refused to leave it and enter the prison for two and a half hours, complaining that he needed the support of his family.
The court session had opened with unusual promptness at 10 a.m. Judge Rafaat pronounced that “defendant Mohamed Hosni Mubarak be sentenced to a life term for the allegations ascribed to him, being an accessory to murder” in the killing of more than 240 demonstrators during the last six days of January 2011.
He called Mr. Mubarak’s tenure “30 years of intense darkness — black, black, black, the blackness of a chilly winter night.” And he said officials had “committed the gravest sins, tyranny and corruption without accountability or oversight as their consciences died, their feelings became numb and their hearts in their chests turned blind.”
“The peaceful sons of the homeland came out of every deep ravine with all the pain they experienced from injustice, heartbreak, humiliation and oppression,” he added. “Bearing the burden of their suffering on their shoulders, they moved peacefully toward Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt’s capital, demanding only justice, freedom and democracy.”
But if Judge Rafaat hoped the people would cheer the verdict, he was soon disappointed as scuffles and chaos broke out in the courtroom. “The people want to cleanse the judiciary,” chanted an angry crowd of lawyers for the victims and other supporters.
The ruling appeared for the first time to bring together a broad spectrum of both liberal and Islamist political leaders in united opposition to Mr. Shafik. By Saturday afternoon, protesters were tearing down Mr. Shafik’s billboards and burning his campaign posters. “Shafik, you disgrace, the revolution continues,” protesters chanted.
Early Sunday morning, protesters in the town of Fayoum invaded a Shafik campaign office, Reuters reported.
As Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister, Mr. Shafik presided over the cabinet when the police failed to protect unarmed protesters in Tahrir Square from a deadly assault by a mob of Mubarak supporters known as the “battle of the camels.”
In a statement, Mr. Shafik said the next president should “comprehend the historic lesson” of the decision. “This means that nobody in Egypt is still above punishment or accountability,” he added.
The other lesson, he said, was that the police must respect human rights, which he said that in its new form most of the “security apparatus already wants to do.”
His opponent, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, pledged that if elected, he would assemble a team of top prosecutors to determine who was responsible for the killings and press new charges against Mr. Mubarak and his aides. Around 9 p.m., Brotherhood members formed two long rows so Mr. Morsi could safely walk into the Tahrir Square crowd, and then cheering supporters carried him on their shoulders.
“The verdict means that the head of the regime and the minister of interior are the only ones who have fallen, but the rest of the entire regime remains,” the Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamist group, said in a statement.” It added, “The Egyptian people have to sense the great danger that threatens their revolution and their hopes, and wastes the blood of the martyrs and the sacrifices of their children.”
Ayman Nour, a liberal candidate who had opposed both Mr. Shafik and Mr. Morsi, announced that “after this flimsy verdict” he was endorsing Mr. Morsi.
In the parking lot outside the makeshift courthouse in a police academy, some initially celebrated the verdict. “I am so happy — this is the greatest happiness I have ever felt,” said Rada Mohamed Mabrouk, a 60-year-old retiree. “The martyrs are all of our children.”
But the elation soon gave way. “They are all innocent? Gamal and Alaa are innocent?” asked Hanan Mohamed el-Rifai, 28, of Alexandria. She said that during protests, the police killed her younger brother, Kareem, 15, with a bullet to the heart. “We will turn the world upside down,” she said.
Other demonstrators brandished nooses to symbolize the sentence they sought.
The credibility of the Mubarak trial was in many ways compromised from the start.
It took place under the rule of the generals who seized power at Mr. Mubarak’s ouster rather than under a permanent constitution guaranteeing judicial independence. Instead of a sweeping examination of the corruption and political repression of the Mubarak government, the prosecutors rushed the case toward trial last spring in an apparent attempt to soothe protesters.
Prosecutors charged Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Adly with directing the police to shoot unarmed protesters during just the first six days of the uprising. Although Health Ministry officials said that about 840 civilians were killed during the protests and thousands of others injured, prosecutors narrowed the case to only about 250 deaths that took place in public squares and under other circumstances in which it is hard for the police to argue self-defense.
The prosecutors also charged Mr. Mubarak and his two sons with just one instance of profiting from their positions. The prosecutors charged that Mr. Mubarak and his sons had received steep discounts on several luxurious vacation homes near the Red Sea from a crony, Hussein Salem. Mr. Mubarak later allowed companies controlled by Mr. Salem to make profitable deals to resell Egyptian natural gas to Israel and buy public land on the Red Sea for development.
The judge dismissed the corruption charges against Mr. Mubarak and his sons on the grounds that a statute of limitations had expired since the three Mubaraks were said to have received the vacation homes. Prosecutors had evidently hoped to date the crime from the subsequent favors Mr. Mubarak did for Mr. Salem. It was unclear why the judge had not raised the statute of limitations issue earlier.
Lawyers said the final legal verdict on Mr. Mubarak would await not only lengthy appeals but most likely further trials as well.
“The trial is far from over,” Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said from outside the courthouse. “We will be in this for years.”
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Kareem Fahim, Mayy El Sheikh and Liam Stack contributed reporting. The New York Times