Ousted president Mohamed Morsi has remained defiant as he went on trial for a prison break during the 2011 uprising, as a top police official was murdered in another sign of Egypt's instability.
The trial, and other violence in which a police guard was gunned down outside a Cairo church, came a day after the military backed army chief Field Marshall Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who led Morsi's ouster in July, to run for office in his place.
Morsi, dressed in a white prison uniform, gesticulated angrily from the glass cage in which he and 21 co-defendants were held.
"Who are you?" he demanded to know, adding, "Do you know who I am?"
"I am the president of the republic. Who are you? Let me hear your voice; I don't hear you," he shouted defiantly.
In response, a judge said: "I am the president of the Cairo Criminal Court."
Among those in the dock was the supreme guide of Morsi's now-banned Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Badie.
In all, 131 people are on trial, including dozens of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist Palestinian movement Hamas and Lebanon's Shiite militant group Hezbollah.
Most of them are being tried in absentia.
Reading the charges, a prosecutor said the "Muslim Brotherhood defendants coordinated with Hamas and Hezbollah to spread chaos and trigger the downfall of the state".
"Eight hundred foreign militants and jihadists infiltrated through illegal tunnels and seized a 60 kilometre border stretch. They attacked security and government buildings and killed many police officers."
He said "three prisons were attacked and more than 50 policemen and prisoners were killed, while more than 20,000 criminals escaped".
The trial was later adjourned until February 22.
In the latest bloodletting, police General Mohamed Saeed was leaving his Cairo home when gunmen on a motorbike opened fire at him, hitting him in the head and the chest before fleeing, security officials said.
Saeed, who was the head of interior minister Mohamed Ibrahim's "technical department", died in hospital.
Hours later gunmen opened fire from a car at policemen guarding a church in the capital, killing one and wounding two. One was arrested, while two others fled on foot.
