Egyptian Judges Drop All Charges Against Mubarak
New York Times-30 minutes ago
CAIRO — An Egyptian court dropped all remaining criminal charges against former President Hosni Mubarak on Saturday in a sweeping ...
Egypt judge drops murder charges against Mubarak, acquits on illicit ...
International-Ahram Online-9 hours ago
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Egypt Court Drops All Murder Charges Against Former Dictator ...
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Egyptian Judges Drop All Charges Against Mubarak
CAIRO — An Egyptian court dropped all remaining criminal charges against former President Hosni Mubarak on Saturday in a sweeping repudiation of the Arab Spring uprising that forced him from power.
The
court dismissed murder charges against Mr. Mubarak in the killing of
protesters demanding an end to his 30-year rule — charges that once
inspired crowds to hang the president’s effigy from the lampposts of
Tahrir Square in Cairo and captivated the region. His reviled security
chief and a half-dozen top police officials were acquitted.
The
court also acquitted Mr. Mubarak, his two sons and a wealthy business
associate of corruption charges; the three others had come to personify
the rampant self-dealing of Mr. Mubarak’s era as much as the president
himself.
If
normal legal procedures are followed, Mr. Mubarak could soon go free
for the first time since his top generals removed him from power amid a
popular revolt in 2011, although it was not clear whether those rules
would be adhered to.
About
1,000 demonstrators gathered around Tahrir Square at night to protest
the decision, but heavily armed security forces had closed off the
traffic circle. By 9 p.m., the police were firing tear gas and birdshot
to drive away the crowds, and by midnight state news media reported that
at least one person had been killed and more than 85 were arrested.
More
than five months after the inauguration of a military-backed strongman,
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the authorities appeared to calculate
that the Egyptian public was so weary of unrest that it had lost a
desire for retribution against Mr. Mubarak, or at least that they now
had a firm enough grip to suppress any backlash.
“Today’s
verdict indicates a very deliberate decision by the regime to continue
on the path of rewriting the history that led to Mubarak’s ouster and
closing the file on the Jan. 25 revolution,” said Hossam Bahgat, a
journalist and human rights advocate who had cheered on that revolt and
is now studying in New York.
The
council of generals who took power from Mr. Mubarak had feared a public
backlash too much to ever allow the former president’s release, but Mr.
Sisi’s government felt no such compunction, Mr. Bahgat said. “They are
not afraid. They are perfectly capable of letting him walk free, and
they feel no pressure to hold him accountable.”
Mr.
Mubarak, 86, who has been held at a military hospital because of frail
health, appeared in court on a stretcher in sunglasses, a blue necktie
and sweater. He remained stone-faced as the chief judge, Mahmoud Kamel
al-Rashidi, read the verdict. Only at the end did he allow himself a
smile as his two sons, Alaa and Gamal, hugged and kissed him.
A
short time later, Mr. Mubarak was photographed waving to admirers from a
hospital balcony. In a telephone interview with a supportive,
pro-government talk show host, the former president scoffed at an
earlier guilty verdict against him. “I laughed when I heard the first
verdict,” he said. He suggested a conspiracy had been behind the 2011
uprising.
“They
turned on us,” he said, and when asked if he meant “the Americans,” he
replied that he could not explain over the phone. “I can’t tell you if
it’s the Americans or who.”
Judge
Rashidi, who led a panel of three judges, did not elaborate from the
bench on their reasoning, pointing instead to a 280-page summary of
their 1,340-page explanation of the case.
He
insisted that the ruling had “nothing to do with politics.” He
acknowledged the “feebleness” and corruption of Mr. Mubarak’s later
years in power, and he saluted the rallying cry of the 2011 revolution —
bread, freedom and social justice.
But
at other times he sounded sympathetic to the former president. “To rule
for or against him after he has become old will be left to history and
the Judge of Judges,” he said.
Judge
Rashidi did not explain from the bench why he had dismissed the murder
charges. Legal analysts said the judge had faulted the way Mr. Mubarak
had been added to an existing case. He acquitted Mr. Mubarak and his
friend the businessman Hussein Salem of corruption charges involving
allegations that they had conspired to sell Egyptian natural gas to
Israel at below-market prices. And he acquitted Mr. Mubarak and his sons
of charges that Mr. Salem gave them vacation homes on the Red Sea as
kickbacks in a land deal. (Mr. Salem fled to Spain in 2011 and was tried
in absentia.)
In
May, Mr. Mubarak was sentenced to three years in prison in a separate
corruption case involving lavish, government-funded improvements to his
and his sons’ private homes. But he has now spent more than three years
in custody on various charges, and under Egyptian law he has thus served
the requisite time and could be released.
Egypt’s public prosecutor said Saturday that he would appeal the new decision.
Sayid
Abdel Latif, whose son Mohamed was a demonstrator killed by police in
the uprising, said he had given up hope for justice. “Is there anyone
who would put himself on trial? Mubarak’s regime is still in place,” he
said.
“The January revolution is over; they ended it,” he said. “We thought Sisi would bring us our rights, but he is one of them.”
The
first sessions of Mr. Mubarak’s trial were often rowdy and loud, with a
courtroom full of human rights lawyers demanding retribution for the
demonstrators who had been killed and for decades of brutal autocracy.
But
the changed context was evident from the start. Judge Rashidi warned
that anyone who interrupted his reading of the decision would be
sentenced to a year in jail, and the spectators stayed obediently quiet.
And
the courtroom was packed with Mubarak supporters instead of human
rights lawyers. As soon as the judge finished, the room erupted in
jubilation.
Commentators
in the state-run and pro-government news media suggested that it was
time to move on from the 2011 revolution and its messy aftermath. “We
have to turn this page, and the long state of argument that has lasted
for years,” Dalia Ziada, director of the Liberal Democracy Institute and
a supporter of Mr. Sisi, said in an interview.
But
with Mr. Mubarak no longer on trial, she also suggested that it might
be time to explore a favorite theory of Mubarak supporters: that the
demonstrators had been shot not by the police, but by Islamists with the
Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood dominated Egypt’s free elections,
but has been outlawed and suppressed under Mr. Sisi; the pro-government
news media has sometimes floated improbable scenarios in which the
Brotherhood both participated in the demonstrations and shot at the
demonstrators.
“Who
killed the protesters?” Ms. Ziada asked, suggesting that investigators
examine “all sides accused, even those that were maybe not present in
today’s case — for example, the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Legal experts said the ultimate outcome of the case had been increasingly clear, in part because of a flawed prosecution.
Prosecutors
originally appointed by Mr. Mubarak had rushed the charges to court in
the months after his ouster to appease the public’s wrath at their
former ruler. But the murder charges were difficult to prove because of
the many layers in the Egyptian military’s chain of command and the
broad latitude for self-defense given to the police. Lawyers for victims
often complained that security forces were withholding evidence or
refusing to cooperate.
The
corruption charges appeared to have been thrown together hastily,
without a thorough review of the many other allegations related to Mr.
Mubarak’s rule.
Mr.
Mubarak first faced the same charges in a trial that ended in 2012,
while the transitional council of military generals was still in power.
Evidently bowing to political pressure, that judge sentenced Mr. Mubarak
to life in prison for the killings of the protesters but simultaneously
acknowledged a lack of evidence. He acquitted everyone below Mr.
Mubarak in the chain of command within the security forces, and threw
out land-related corruption charges on technical grounds and ruled
against the gas charges.
An appeals court threw out the verdict and ordered the retrial that ended in Saturday’s decision.
“The
judges were basically collaborating with Mubarak from the first scene,”
said Khaled Ali, a human rights lawyer and former presidential
candidate. “It was not a trial, just a game they are playing with the
people, to relieve them and then enslave them again.”
The
political climate now is starkly different. Mr. Sisi, the former
general who last year led the military takeover that ousted Egypt’s
elected Islamist government, has consolidated power and surrounded
himself with former Mubarak advisers.
State-run
and pro-government news media now routinely denounce the pro-democracy
activists who led the 2011 uprising as a “fifth column” out to undermine
the state. Some of the most prominent activists are in prison, and the
Islamists who won free elections are now jailed as terrorists along with
thousands of their supporters.
Mohamed
Morsi, the deposed president and a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, is
now facing several trials in the same courtroom, some for charges that
could carry the death penalty.
As
the prison doors revolve, many of the most despised figures of the
Mubarak era, such as Ahmed Ezz, the ruling party power broker and
business tycoon, have already been released on charges brought against
them in the heat of the 2011 uprising.
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