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Egyptian Court Overturns Mubarak’s Conviction Egyptian Court Rejects Verdict Against Mubarak
(about 9 hours later)
CAIRO — An Egyptian appeals court on Sunday overturned the life sentence of former President Hosni Mubarak for directing the killing of protesters, a ruling that could prolong a politically fraught legal battle over the fate of Egypt’s deposed autocrat two years after he was ousted. CAIRO — An Egyptian appeals court on Sunday threw out the guilty verdict and life sentence against former President Hosni Mubarak on charges that he allowed the killing of protesters. The court ordered a new trial, which would once again send the ailing autocrat rolling on a stretcher into the steel defendant’s cage in an Egyptian criminal court.
The court is said to have ordered a new trial. Although expected, the decision may also put the issue of retribution for Mr. Mubarak and his inner circle back in the news just as a campaign begins for new parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for April. The decision may also bolster the prospects of the Islamist party of President Mohamed Morsi, who campaigned last year on a pledge to seek a retrial of Mr. Mubarak, capitalizing on anger over the weak conviction shortly after it was released. Whether this was a victory or a setback for Mr. Mubarak was confused and contested. Both the prosecution and the defense had appealed the verdict, one side seeking a stronger verdict and the other an acquittal. Lawyers for the Islamist party allied with President Mohamed Morsi argued that a new trial with new evidence could yield a death penalty.
Even as his opponents had begun collaborating with former members of Mr. Mubarak’s old party, Mr. Morsi has made legal action against leaders of the former government a priority, sometimes suggesting that corrupt former colleagues of Mr. Mubarak were behind a conspiracy to disrupt the transition to democracy. But other Egyptians reacted to the decision with exasperated sighs, seeing a parable of the country’s fitful progress in its struggle to break free of its autocratic past.
A ruling that overturned Mr. Mubarak’s conviction had been considered probably since his conviction last year. The judge who handed down the verdict said at the time that he was convicting Mr. Mubarak on the principle of presidential responsibility even though he had seen no evidence that the former president had personally ordered or directed the killings. More than 800 civilians were killed during the three weeks of protests that ended Mr. Mubarak’s 30-year rule almost two years ago. “Oh my God, we went back to square one, back to the early days of the revolution two years ago, when people were first calling for a Mubarak trial,” said Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University of Cairo.
The court on Sunday erupted in cries of jubilation and protest after the decision was announced. Mr. Mubarak’s supporters jumped onto desks in the courtroom to celebrate, and a handful of others demonstrated outside. Mr. Mubarak’s unending case, he said, reflects Egypt’s unfinished revolution, in which a leader of the old Islamist opposition has come to preside uneasily over the largely still intact institutions of Mr. Mubarak’s former government, including the courts and the police.
The appeals court did not immediately disclose its reasoning, but early reports suggested that the court had found procedural problems in the conduct of the original hearings. In an interview with state news media, Farid El-Deeb, a lawyer for Mr. Mubarak, said that ordering a new trial for the same crimes merely because the prosecution failed to produce any evidence would be impermissible double jeopardy. “You are fighting Mubarak with his laws and his men,” Mr. Shahin said.
Mr. Mubarak, who has been held in a military hospital because of health concerns, will remain in custody. Perhaps in anticipation of the appeals court decision, prosecutors on Saturday ordered that Mr. Mubarak be detained for an additional period because of a new investigation that they had started into personal gifts he received from Al Ahram, the state news media organization that publishes a newspaper of the same name. With a parliamentary election set for April, the new trial appeared certain to revive the calls for justice and revenge that once animated the uprising against Mr. Mubarak. Among Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters, the renewed attention to the case played into their depiction of an epic struggle between Egypt’s newly elected leaders and the vestiges of the old state.
Now under new management, Al Ahram reported Saturday that Mr. Mubarak was under questioning about gifts, including gold pens, designer neckties, leather bags, shoes, gold jewelry and expensive watches, that the media organization gave him between 2006 and 2011 as demonstrations of loyalty. The newspaper said Mr. Mubarak was facing possible new charges, including squandering public funds and improperly profiting from the gifts. “God’s will was for the trial to be redone under Morsi, with the availability of new evidence and new defendants,” Essam el-Erian, a senior leader of President Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party, said in a statement.
A presidential fact-finding committee presented a report to Mr. Morsi this month that accused Mr. Mubarak of having far more direct awareness of the violence against the protesters than previously disclosed. The Web site of the Information Ministry last week reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the committee’s conclusions, that it found that Mr. Mubarak had watched the brutal tactics of his security forces in the streets over a special television monitor in his office and also received “firsthand reports.” Mr. Mubarak, 84, spent Sunday night in a military hospital, where he has been transferred repeatedly from his prison cell because of a host of reported health problems, some resulting from falls in the prison bathroom. At one point last year, the official Egyptian state news agency erroneously reported that he was “clinically dead” from a stroke. His first trial was conducted under the rule of the generals who seized power at his ouster, and have since ceded authority to Mr. Morsi.
Ali al-Gineidy, a member of the committee, said in an interview that Habib el-Adly, Mr. Mubarak’s interior minister, had the panel, “Mubarak knew everything, big and small.” Mr. Adly was convicted at the same trial as Mr. Mubarak, and his conviction was also overturned Sunday. More than 800 civilian demonstrators were killed, many of them by police and security forces, during the three weeks of mostly nonviolent protests that ended Mr. Mubarak’s rule. When the transitional government pursued charges against Mr. Mubarak and his circle, human rights lawyers faulted the prosecutors for relying on the same police force accused of killing the protesters to collect evidence against itself. And during Mr. Mubarak’s trial, many accused the prosecutors of failing to make good use of the evidence they did gather.
In November, Mr. Morsi set off an uproar with a sweeping presidential decree that, among others things, sidestepped legal procedures to name a new chief prosecutor on the grounds that the previous, Mubarak-appointed prosecutor had failed to move aggressively enough against the leaders and cronies of the old autocracy. The guilty verdict was considered ripe for appeal from the moment it was issued, because the judge who handed it down said at the time that he had seen no evidence to back up a conviction. Instead, the judge reasoned that Mr. Mubarak and his Interior Ministry bore responsibility for the deaths of the protesters by virtue of their positions; he acquitted a half-dozen subordinate Interior Ministry officials who were charged in the same case.
Under Egyptian law, the ruling on Sunday effectively rewinds the court proceedings to the original indictment of Mr. Mubarak in 2011. When the case is assigned to a new court, the judge will have broad latitude and can send the case back to prosecutors for further investigation and new evidence, or even amend the charges.
Evidently anticipating Sunday’s ruling, Egyptian prosecutors recently had begun a new case against Mr. Mubarak, accusing him of taking payoffs from the state news organization Al Ahram in the form of $1 million in gifts over the last six years of his rule. The prosecutors issued an order on Saturday that would allow them to go on detaining Mr. Mubarak for questioning in that matter even if the court threw out his conviction in the protesters’ deaths.
But on Sunday, the state media reported that Mr. Mubarak and his family had unexpectedly agreed to repay $3 million in gifts he and they had received from Al Ahram in order to resolve the charges. If the repayment is accepted, the judge who hears the retrial could decide whether Mr. Mubarak remains in prison or goes free in the interim.
On the other side, lawyers with Mr. Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party and other advocates of a stronger conviction said they hoped that in a retrial, the prosecutors would take advantage of the findings of a presidential fact-finding commission looking into the protesters’ deaths.
The commission’s findings have not been disclosed publicly, but they reportedly include evidence that Mr. Mubarak was fully aware of the brutal tactics his police were using against protesters, something he denied in the first trial. Members of the commission have said that Mr. Mubarak received “firsthand” reports and watched the street battles around Tahrir Square on a video monitor in his office as they happened.
Ali al-Gineidy, a former member of the commission, said in an interview that Habib el-Adly, Mr. Mubarak’s interior minister, told the panel that “Mubarak knew everything, big and small.” Mr. Adly did not testify in the first trial, and it was unclear whether he would in the second.
So far, no credible reports about the commission’s findings have said that it found any evidence that Mr. Mubarak ordered or directed the use of deadly force against the protesters, the most serious accusation against him.
The commission’s findings could help make a retrial more credible, said Hossam Bahgat, the executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which has tracked the case.
“For the second trial to be more serious at all is going to require more rigorous investigation, and that can’t be done by the same police force,” Mr. Bahgat said, adding that if the second trial sticks to the same evidence as the first, it will almost certainly result in acquittal.
Before the court’s decision on Sunday, Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Adly were the only defendants to be convicted of any responsibility for the killing of the protesters, Mr. Bahgat noted. At least 93 police officers or Interior Ministry officials have been acquitted.

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.