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New Coma Report About Mubarak

An image grab taken from Egyptian state TV shows ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak sitting inside a cage in a courtroom during his verdict hearing in Cairo on June 2.
AFP/Getty Images
An image grab taken from Egyptian state TV shows ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak sitting inside a cage in a courtroom during his verdict hearing in Cairo on June 2.

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak "entered today into a full coma," according to Interior Ministry spokesman Alaa Mahmoud, CNN says.

Piers Scholfield of the BBC, though, reports on his Twitter page that a ministry spokesman has told his nework that Mubarak, 84, "has some health problems but is not in a coma."

Reports about whether Mubarak is or isn't in a coma have been swirling in recent days. We'll watch for more definitive word. And NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson is working the story in Cairo.

As The Associated Press writes:

"Mubarak's health is reported to have collapsed since his June 2 conviction for failing to stop the killing of protesters during the uprising that overthrew him in 2011. His life sentence saw him transferred immediately to a prison hospital, instead of the military hospital and other facilities where he had been held since his April 2011 arrest."

Update at 10:50 a.m. ET. Mubarak Is Stable, State-Run Media Say:

From Cairo, Soraya tells our Newscast Desk that "state-run media outlets report that while Mubarak's condition deteriorated after the June 2 verdict, he is now stable." And, she adds that "his critics here claim the health scare is aimed at building public support for his being allowed to leave the prison."

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.