When Anwar Ibrahim was brought into the sessions court in Kuala Lumpur yesterday morning, his two daughters began crying. They had not set eyes on their father, until recently the deputy prime minister of Malaysia, since he was seized by masked policemen on September 20th.
Now they saw how his left eye had been blackened when he was, by his own account, beaten unconscious by police, and how haggard he looked after nine days in custody, most of it in solitary confinement and in darkness.
Mr Anwar was hugged by his own father and allowed to call his mother on a mobile telephone. His wife, Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, an eye doctor who trained in Ireland for six years, was also seeing him for the first time since his detention along with 13 followers under Malaysia's Internal Security Act, and was able to make a professional examination of the damaged eye before the proceedings began.
"My husband was the victim of police brutality," she said last night, when she defied police orders and held a press conference in a suburban hotel in an atmosphere of deepening political crisis.
Ms Wan Azizah said she was shocked when she saw Mr Anwar. Dressed in pink silk head-scarf and fiddling with silver-rimmed spectacles as she sat on a couch, she recalled how she had been questioned by police last week for expressing the fear that her husband would be injected with the AIDS virus.
"I was so worried about him then," she said. "The fact was I was very fearful, and my fears were not unfounded. But his spirit is strong and I am proud of that." Her strength, she said, "comes from the fact of knowing that he is innocent".
This faith in Mr Anwar received a boost last night with the sensational news from lawyers for two men jailed after admitting being sodomised by Mr Anwar that they had retracted their confessions.
Only last week Malaysia's Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who sacked Mr Anwar after deep policy differences emerged between them, said he had talked to the two men to confirm their stories.
Lawyers in the crowded first-floor corridor of the old British courthouse yesterday expressed outrage at the way Mr Anwar was being treated. Pointing to groups of riot police patrolling the streets below with M60 rifles, one said: "I have seen nothing like this in 20 years' practice."
None would give their names but many were keen to express anti-government views.
A senior barrister told me that 100 members of the 7,300 member bar council of Malaysia had arranged for an emergency meeting on October 10th to condemn the "flouting" of the legal process.
"We are totally opposed to this kind of state power," he fulminated. Another said: "We can't even speak our minds openly. People are getting fed up."
Ms Wan Azizah said her message for Malaysians was "Look for yourselves at what is happening and open your hearts and your eyes".
Mr Anwar has become identified with a burgeoning movement in Malaysia against corruption and the use of the Interior Security Act to lock up government opponents including 13 Anwar supporters. His treatment comes at the culmination of a bitter power struggle with Dr Mahathir, ostensibly over economic policy.
During the six-hour hearing in the court, nine corruption and four sodomy charges were laid by state prosecutors against Mr Anwar. To all he pleaded not guilty, and the charges were referred to the high court for trial.