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Derechos | Equipo Nizkor
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Derechos | Equipo Nizkor
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21Aug13
Egyptian court orders Mubarak released from prison
Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak could leave prison as early as Wednesday night, government officials and legal experts said, after a Cairo court ordered the release of the deposed autocrat who ruled Egypt for three decades.
Mubarak's release would constitute another dramatic blow to the Islamists who participated in the broad protest movement that forced his removal from office in February 2011 and who have rallied in recent weeks against the July 3 ouster of Mohamed Morsi from the presidency.
The Egyptian prosecutor's office said Mubarak would remain on the country's no-fly list and that his assets would remain frozen.
Still, his departure from prison would lend credibility to the Islamist opposition's claims that the old regime is reasserting itself since the military coup that ousted Morsi, the country's first democratically elected president. Egyptian security services in recent weeks have launched a deadly crackdown against Morsi's allies.
Mubarak's release was ordered by an Egyptian court on Wednesday, after the 85-year-old former air force commander agreed to return or pay the value of gifts he received from state news organizations while in office, a spokesman for Egypt's Foreign Ministry said.
It was the last of three cases brought against Mubarak since he was ousted from power in the Arab Spring uprising. Judicial authorities accepted Mubarak's appeals for a retrial on earlier charges of corruption and killing protesters during the uprising. Other charges related to the renovation of the presidential palace were dismissed earlier for lack of evidence.
"According to our penal code, you cannot detain a person for more than two years, without indicting him," said Badr Abdellaty, a spokesman for Egypt's Foreign Ministry.
"So he can stay at home," Abdellaty said, and go from there to court for his retrials.
The Egyptian prosecutor's office, part of a judiciary that critics have long accused of being stacked with Mubarak allies, said Wednesday that it would not appeal the case's dismissal. Legal experts said Mubarak could leave Cairo's Tora prison within hours.
"The prosecution has no legal ground to appeal the decision of his release, as Mubarak paid the money he took, and has no legal ground for his detention," said Yassir Mohammad Sayyid Ahmad, an attorney representing families of Egyptians killed by Mubarak's security forces during the 18-day uprising in 2011, in which more than 800 people died.
Also Wednesday, Egyptian security forces arrested a prominent Islamist cleric as he tried to flee the country. Safwat Hegazy, who has been charged with inciting violence, was nabbed by police in the oasis town of Siwa, near the Libyan border, Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdellaty said.
Abdellaty said Hegazy had shaved all off of his hair, including his beard, leaving just a goatee, and had "even changed the color of his hair."
Abdellaty said that one high-ranking official from the Muslim Brotherhood, Mahmoud Ezzat, was known to have successfully left the country. The state has thrown most of the group's top officials in jail, holding them virtually incommunicado under a host of charges that the group says are politically motivated.
Other prominent Islamist leaders have been on the run from a sweeping nationwide crackdown that has intensified since a brutal August 14 raid on two pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo.
[Source: By Abigail Hauslohner, The Washington Post, 21Aug13]
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