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The EU's top diplomat, Lady Ashton, has confirmed that Mohamed Morsi is safe and well after a two-hour meeting with Egypt's overthrown president – his first disclosed contact with the outside world since he was arrested by soldiers and held incommunicado in an unknown location on 3 July.
The EU's Catherine Ashton, a Labour peer, said that Morsi was aware of events going on outside, and that Egypt's army had freely agreed to their meeting. But Ashton said she did not know where he was being held – implying that the Egyptian authorities had made sure she could not see the route by which she arrived at the meeting. It had previously been suggested that Morsi was being held either inside a military prison, or at one of Cairo's several presidential palaces – or at the city's Tora prison, where Morsi's predecessor Hosni Mubarak is already being held.
"We had a friendly, open and very frank discussion for the two hours I saw him," said Ashton.
"I don't know where he is – but I saw the facilities he has and we had a warm discussion, because as you know I've met with him many times before. I sent him many wishes from people here and he sent many wishes back – and of course I tried to let his family know that he is well."
Last week, Morsi's children said they had not seen or heard from their father since the start of his detention. "What is happening to President Morsi is a violation of his rights by all measures," Osama Morsi, the ex-president's son and lawyer, told reporters at the time. "Our father is held incommunicado, which contravenes the most basic of human rights conventions."
Ashton is in Cairo to try to negotiate an unlikely settlement between Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood and the army, but demands and recent behaviour from both sides mean reconciliation is far from likely. The Brotherhood's core demand is for Morsi's return as president – a requisite the army will never agree to. Meanwhile, the army have made negotiations almost impossible by mounting a crackdown on senior Muslim Brothers and killed dozens of their followers in two brutal massacres.
Morsi was held without charge for more than three weeks before prosecutors revealed last Friday that the former president was under investigation for conspiring to help the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas murder police officers during Egypt's 2011 uprising. A spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood called the allegations "laughable".
With or without Ashton, Egypt's impasse looks set to continue. The Brotherhood is scheduled to defy the military's call for them to leave the streets with another mass protest in Cairo on Tuesday afternoon.
The army sees an end to such marches, and the closure of pro-Morsi sit-ins – such as the camp at east Cairo's Rabaa al-Adawiya – as a prerequisite for negotiations. But the Brotherhood sees its street presence as its only safeguard against further crackdowns on their supporters.
"A lot of people are scared to go home because they know they will be arrested," said Mohamed Soudan, a spokesman for the Brotherhood's political wing, speaking at Rabaa in the early hours of Tuesday morning. "Don't tell me we should engage in the political process. There is no political process in Egypt."
"If we surrender, we will be killed," said Saad al-Husseini, the governor of the northern city of Kafr el-Sheikh during Morsi's presidency.
Other senior members of the Brotherhood argued that it was up to the military to compromise first, since their recent and brutal treatment of Morsi supporters gave the Brotherhood little faith in the army's intentions. "What have they compromised on?" said Gamal Heshmat, a member of the group's 19-strong governing body. "They've arrested thousands of us, killed hundreds, pursued our leaders, and shut down [sympathetic] television channels."
Critics of the Brotherhood accuse them of fostering a sense of victimhood and of seeking martyrdom instead of realistic political solutions. Others also call them hypocrites for having ignored the brutal treatment of protesters during Morsi's tenure.
