Doctors restart Hosni Mubarak's heart

Hosni Mubarak's sons were at his bedside on Monday after the former Egyptian president's heart briefly stopped beating, according to officials.

A defibrillator had to be used on Mubarak twice as he lay in the Tora prison hospital in Cairo, they said.

He is said to have gone into a rapid decline since being transferred there after receiving a life sentence on June 2 for complicity in the deaths of hundreds of protesters during the uprising that led to his overthrow in February last year.

Despite reports that he had slipped into a coma, he was able to see his wife, Suzanne, on Sunday and to ask for his older son, Alaa, to join his younger son, Gamal, beside him. Both sons are in custody awaiting trial for share fraud, having been acquitted of corruption charges.

Opposition activists suspect claims of Mubarak's decline are part of attempts to have him transferred to a more comfortable military hospital.

But his lawyer, Farid al-Deeb, quoted Mubarak as saying that his former army colleagues were "trying to kill him".