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August 21st, 2013 
Peter Nolan
Mr Mubarak was arrested in April 2011, two months after he quit office and
fled to his home in Sharm el-Sheikh, and found guilty of failing to stop the
killings of 846 protesters after a chaotic series of hearings. That verdict
was later quashed and a retrial ordered, but prisoners can only be held on
remand for two years in Egypt.
Supporters of the interim authorities, who last month deposed the Muslim
Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi, say that Mr Mubarak’s release is a
technical, legal issue answering petitions already posted by his lawyers.
However, Essam al-Batawi, the lawyer for his co-accused and former interior
minister, Habib al-Adly, indicated that the judges in the embezzlement case
had acted under their own discretion in releasing him on bail. He still
faces the charges, which relate to payments for presidential palaces.
He said the judges were taking into account his age and health, and the fact
that he is unlikely to abscond.
The role of the judiciary in the period after the 2011 revolution is key to
the often violent conflicts between the Muslim Brotherhood and other
factions in Egyptian politics. The organisation accused a number of judges
of being “remnants” of the old regime and trying to stymie its own
“legitimate” democratic rule.
They will claim that Mr Mubarak’s release, combined with the transfer to the
same prison of large numbers of Brotherhood leaders rounded up since their
protest sit-ins were forcibly cleared last week, shows the military have
simply returned Egypt to where it was before the revolution.
A senior Brotherhood spokesman, Mourad Ali, became the latest leader to be
arrested on Wednesday, when he was prevented from leaving the country at
Cairo Airport. An independent radical cleric who was given a platform for
rabble-rousing speeches at Brotherhood rallies, Safwat Hegazi, at which he
stirred up anti-Christian feeling, was also seized, allegedly heading for
the Libyan border.
On
Tuesday morning, the Brotherhood’s supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, 70, was
arrested at a flat in north-east Cairo and taken to Torah.
The ruling also angered representatives of families of those killed in the
revolution, even though the case did not directly affect theirs.
Nasser al-Askalani, one of the lawyers, said it showed that nothing had
changed, either under the Brotherhood government or since it was removed.
“What is happening now is a natural precursor to the release of Mubarak,” he
said. “We are not optimistic that the final sentence will come down in
favour of the martyrs of the January revolution.
“Since the last session, and the decision to prevent the victims’ lawyers from
attending the hearings, we have lost hope of getting a ruling in our favour.
“All defendants in cases of killing protesters during the January revolution
and in corruption cases have been cleared, and only the Mubarak case was
left. All the indications suggest that its fate will be the same as all the
other cases.”
As the judges made their ruling, European Union foreign ministers were meeting
in Brussels to decide whether to suspend aid to Egypt in response to the
violent crackdown on the opposition protests last week, in which more than
1,000 people were killed according to independent Egyptian monitors.
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