This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
Egyptian Court Is Said to Order That Mubarak Be Released
Egypt in Tumult as Court Orders Mubarak Freed
(about 13 hours later)
CAIRO — A court in Egypt has ordered that former President Hosni Mubarak, who has been detained on a variety of charges since his ouster in 2011, should be set free, according to state media and security officials on Monday, but it remained possible that the authorities would find a way to keep him in detention and his release did not appear imminent.
CAIRO — A court on Monday ordered the release of former President Hosni Mubarak, and for the first time it was conceivable he might go free — a measure of how far the tumult now shaking Egypt has rolled back the sweeping changes and soaring hopes that followed his exit two and a half years ago.
Egyptian state media reported that Mr. Mubarak would remain in custody for another two weeks under a previous judicial order before the authorities make a decision on his release. The outcome of their deliberations is likely to be read as a pivotal test of the new government installed by General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi and its desire to replicate or repudiate Mr. Mubarak’s rule.
Few legal analysts thought a release was likely, at least in the coming weeks. But under the government installed last month by Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, they say, it is no longer a foregone conclusion that prosecutors will continue to find reasons to detain the former autocrat, who was arrested after the uprising against his rule in 2011.
The development threatened to inject a volatile new element into the standoff between the country’s military and the Islamist supporters of the deposed President Mohamed Morsi, as Egypt entered the sixth day of a state of emergency following a bloody crackdown by the military in which hundreds of people have been killed.
Some analysts said that even the possibility of Mr. Mubarak’s release, previously unthinkable, provided another sign of the return of his authoritarian style of government.
It was unclear how Egyptians — particularly those who have welcomed the military action against Mr. Morsi — would respond to the release of a despised autocrat whose downfall united Mr. Mubarak’s secular and Islamist foes. News of the legal maneuvers came at a time of sustained bloodletting.
Since the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi, the interim government has brought back not only prominent faces of the Mubarak era but signature elements of that autocratic state, including an “emergency law” removing the right to a trial and curbs on police abuse, the appointment of generals as governors across the provinces and moves to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood again as a terrorist threat.
Just in the past 24 hours, the Egyptian government has acknowledged that its security forces had killed 36 Islamists in its custody, while suspected militants were reported on Monday to have killed at least 24 police officers and wounded 3 others in an attack on their minibuses in the restive northern Sinai region.
The Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Mohamed Badie, was arrested early Tuesday. A private television network that supports General Sisi broadcast footage of Mr. Badie in custody.
Mr. Mubarak, 85, faces an array of legal challenges including allegations of corruption and a retrial on charges of complicity in the murder of protesters whose revolt forced his ouster in February, 2011.
The police scarcely bothered to offer a credible explanation for the deaths of three dozen Morsi supporters in custody over the weekend. After repeatedly shifting stories, they ultimately said the detainees had suffocated from tear gas during a failed escape attempt. But photographs taken at the morgue on Monday showed that at least two had been badly burned from the shoulders up and that others bore evidence of torture.
On Monday, Mr. Mubarak’s lawyer, Farid el-Deeb, said a court had ordered his release and he might be freed this week. But there was no official confirmation from the military-backed interim government that Mr. Mubarak would be set free.
Security officers have a new bounce in their step. They are again pulling men from their cars at checkpoints for interrogation because they have beards, or dealing out arbitrary beatings with a sense of impunity — Mubarak-era hallmarks that had receded in recent years. Among civilians, even those outside the Muslin Brotherhood, fear of the police is growing.
News reports said that the ambush on Monday morning had occurred in a village near the border town of Rafah. It was the latest in a series of attacks in Sinai since the military forced Mr. Morsi from office on July 3.
Badr Abdelatty, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, denied any resemblance between the new government and Mr. Mubarak’s. “The emergency law is just for one month and for one objective: fighting terrorism,” he said, using the term that the new government applies to both civil disobedience and acts of violence by Islamist opponents of the military takeover. “The only way to fight terrorism is to apply the rule of law, and some emergency measures for just one month, to bring back law and order.”
The attackers were initially depicted as Islamist militants firing rocket-propelled grenades at the police minibuses.
More than 1,000 Brotherhood members and other supporters of Mr. Morsi have died since Wednesday in a police crackdown, and his ouster has set off a wave of retaliatory violence from his supporters, mainly targeting churches around the country and security forces in the relatively lawless northern Sinai. In the latest episode there, militants killed 25 police officers and wounded 3 others on Monday in an attack on their minibuses. Officials said the bodies were face down with bound hands, evidently assassinated.
But there was some confusion, with later reports quoting officials who put the death toll at 25. Officials were also quoted as saying that the officers had been forced from their minibuses, told to lie on the ground and then shot to death. There was no immediate official confirmation of the events.
Egyptian state and private television networks, all pro-government now, broadcast images of the bodies’ return to Cairo, sometimes under a heading about Egypt’s fight against terrorism. The Muslim Brotherhood, which has denounced those killings, held protests and marches by thousands of its supporters in Cairo and across the country, as it has every day for the six weeks since Mr. Morsi’s ouster.
The Sinai Peninsula borders the Gaza Strip and Israel, which is planning to intensify a diplomatic campaign urging Europe and the United States to support the military-backed government in Egypt despite its deadly crackdown on Islamist protesters, according to a senior Israeli official involved in the effort.
Some analysts said Monday that the new government was arguably more authoritarian than Mr. Mubarak’s. “The Mubarak state was actually less repressive than what we are seeing now,” said Shadi Hamid, research director for the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. “In terms of sheer number of people killed, what we are seeing is unprecedented for Egypt.”
Israeli ambassadors in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels and other capitals planned to advance the argument that the military was the only hope to prevent further chaos in Cairo. On another diplomatic front, ambassadors from the 28-member European Union planned to meet on Monday to review the bloc’s relationship with Egypt, confronting a similar question of whether stability and security outweigh considerations relating to human rights and democracy.
But where Mr. Mubarak’s supporters were diffident or self-serving, Mr. Hamid said, General Sisi “has the fervent backing of millions of ordinary Egyptians, many of whom think the army has not been sufficiently brutal against the Muslim Brotherhood.”
In a radio interview on Monday, William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said he did not accept that outsiders were powerless to influence events. “But we have to do our best to promote democratic institutions, to promote political dialogue and to keep faith with the majority of Egyptians who just want a free and stable and prosperous country,” he told the BBC.
“That is what makes this new authoritarian order much more resilient and harder to dislodge,” he said.
“What we’ve done in Britain so far is that we have suspended projects with the Egyptian security forces. We have revoked a number of export licenses, and I think then among the European countries we should review together how we try to aid Egypt, what aid and assistance we give to Egypt in the future,” he said. He added, “Foreign policy is often about striking the right balance.”
One human rights advocate said the symbolism of Mr. Mubarak’s release might help. “For someone like me, it would be greatly helpful,” said Hossam Bahgat, founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and one of only a few advocates who have questioned General Sisi’s declaration that he was advancing the 2011 revolution by removing the elected president.
He described the current crisis as bleak. “I think it will take years, maybe decades, to play out,” he said, “and through that we have to keep our nerve in clearly supporting democracy, democratic institutions, promoting dialogue and there will be many setbacks in doing that and we should not be surprised when they take place.”
“It is better to end the theatrics and have some clarity,” Mr. Bahgat argued, if only to convince former revolutionaries of the danger that the authoritarianism of “the Mubarak state” may be re-emerging in a different guise.
On Sunday, there appeared to be a pause in the street battles that since Wednesday have claimed more than 1,000 lives, most of them Islamists and their supporters gunned down by security forces. The Islamists took measures on Sunday to avoid further confrontations, including canceling several protests over the military’s ouster of a democratically elected Islamist-led government.
Judges have dismissed many charges originally brought against Mr. Mubarak, including directing the killing of protesters. But the previous post-Mubarak governments always made clear that they would keep finding new allegations to keep the former leader behind bars. The council of generals that succeeded Mr. Mubarak was too desperate to placate the public and preserve its own legitimacy to release him, and Mr. Morsi campaigned on promises to keep him locked up.
While confirming the killings of the detainees on Sunday, the Ministry of the Interior said the deaths were the consequence of an escape attempt by Islamist prisoners. But officials of the main Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, described the deaths as “assassinations” and said that the victims, which it said numbered 52, had been shot and tear-gassed through the windows of a locked prison van.
But the Sisi government has no such insecurity about its power, or hostility to Mr. Mubarak. Some members of political factions that had previously joined rallies for Mr. Mubarak’s incarceration, or even execution, said they believed the public did not care so much anymore.
The killings were the latest indication that Egypt is careering into uncharted territory, with neither side willing to back down. Egyptians are increasingly split over the way forward and there is no obvious political solution in sight. The government is considering banning the Brotherhood, which might force the group underground but would not unravel it from the fabric of society it has been part of for eight decades.
“I don’t think people are paying the slightest attention,” said Hussein Gohar, a spokesman for the Social Democratic Party. “And if it happens, it will not have anything close to the impact it would have had a year ago,” he said of Mr. Mubarak’s release, in part “because people have moved on” and in part “because of the paradigm shift to support for the army.”
Foreign governments also remain divided over the increasingly bloody showdown. American officials said they had taken preliminary steps to withhold financial aid to the Egyptian government, though not crucial military aid, and the European Union said Sunday that the interim government bore the responsibility for bringing the violence to an end.
Besides, Mr. Gohar said, he did not think the new military-backed authorities would allow massive protests against Mr. Mubarak, once an Air Force general. “At the end of the day, Mubarak is part of the military,” Mr. Gohar said. “He is one of them.”
But the Egyptian military retains the support of the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have pledged billions in aid to the new government.
The interim government bears other resemblances to the Mubarak government. General Sisi, the defense minister, was Mr. Mubarak’s head of military intelligence. The figurehead president, Adli Mansour, a judge, was appointed to a top court under Mr. Mubarak. The interior minister was a high-ranking official under Mr. Mubarak. The foreign minister is a senior ambassador who served in Washington. The finance minister is an economist who worked closely with Mr. Mubarak’s son and designated successor, Gamal, who became a senior figure in the old ruling party. And the justice minister is another judge appointed to a top court under Mr. Mubarak.
Although it appeared that security forces were more restrained on Sunday — with no immediate reports of killings in the streets — General Sisi, the country’s military leader, spoke out on national television in defiant and uncompromising tones, condemning the Islamists again as “terrorists” but promising to restore democracy to the country.
But many pointed to crucial differences between now and the Mubarak era.
The government has been pursuing a relentless campaign to paint the Islamists as a threat, and it has increasingly lashed out at journalists who do not echo that line, especially the foreign news media.
Mr. Gohar of the Social Democrats said the revolution had inculcated a new demand for participation and accountability that would prevent a return to the old order. “There is still a deep state, of course, but you cannot go back,” he said, adding that continued pro-Morsi protests demonstrated Egyptians’ new assertiveness. “People are not going to be passive anymore and just accept what is handed to them by the government.”
Acknowledging but rejecting the widespread international criticism of the security force’s actions, the general said that “citizens invited the armed forces to deal with terrorism, which was a message to the world and the foreign media, who denied millions of Egyptians their free will and their true desire to change.”
Mr. Bahgat argued that General Sisi’s government might rely on the same people, institutions and tactics that Mr. Mubarak did, but said it was a new authoritarianism, not a restoration. This time, he said, there is a much greater emphasis on “the propaganda machine,” suggesting that attention to public opinion may be the main legacy of the 2011 revolt.
The Muslim Brotherhood had announced that it would stage nine protest marches in and around Cairo on Sunday as part of its “week of departure” campaign that began Friday to protest the military’s deposing of the country’s first democratically elected president, Mr. Morsi.
Many analysts say that whatever its inclinations, the government is unlikely to risk even a small public backlash at this volatile moment by releasing Mr. Mubarak. If it does not, his continued incarceration opens the intriguing possibility that he and Mr. Morsi, now detained at an unknown location, might end up in jail together. Mr. Morsi is no stranger to jail: he was there as a political prisoner just before Mr. Mubarak’s ouster.
All but three of the marches were canceled, and even those that continued were rerouted to avoid snipers who were waiting ahead, along with bands of government supporters, the police and the military, some in tanks. The authorities, too, appeared to avoid aggressively enforcing martial law provisions, including a 7 p.m. curfew, that would have led to clashes with the protesters.
Alan
Cowell contributed reporting from London, and Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo.
Protesters who gathered at the Al Rayyan mosque in the Maadi area of Cairo had aimed to march from there to the Constitutional Court, Egypt’s supreme court. The chief justice, Adli Mansour, has been appointed interim president by the country’s military rulers.
Marching in the 100-degree late afternoon heat, the protesters were fatalistic about the threats they faced. Mohammad Abdel Tawab, who said his brother was killed Friday at Ramses Square, had heard the reports of pro-government snipers and gangs ahead. “They will kill us, I know, everybody knows, but it doesn’t matter,” he said.
Protest leaders, however, were more cautious and rerouted the march at the last moment to avoid confrontations.
There were scant details on the prison killings on Sunday, and no explanation for why the victims were inside a prison van and had reportedly taken a prison official hostage.
The Ministry of the Interior issued conflicting and confusing accounts, at one point claiming the prisoners had taken a guard hostage, then saying militants had attacked the prison van to free the prisoners, who were killed in the process, and then saying tear gas being used to suppress the escape had caused the prisoners to suffocate. Later, the ministry claimed the deaths had happened in the prison, not in the van.
David D. Kirkpatrick and Rod Nordland reported from Cairo and Alan Cowell from London. Mayy El Sheikh and Kareem Fahim and contributed reporting from Cairo.
