Egyptian court orders Hosni Mubarak's release

 

When President Hosni Mubarak was toppled in a 2011 revolt and later jailed, Egyptians who rose up against him hoped he would be a convict for life, or executed.

However, an Egyptian court ordered Mubarak’s release on Wednesday, his lawyer said, meaning he could leave prison on Thursday as there are no longer any legal grounds for his detention.

Mubarak is being retried on charges of ordering the killing of protesters during the uprising, but has already served the maximum amount of pre-trial detention permitted in that case.

The surprise move could deepen political turmoil in Egypt, where the army-backed government is cracking down hard on Mubarak’s old Islamist enemies in the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mubarak never expected to be president. But when a burst of assassins’ bullets thrust him into the job in 1981, he made it his life’s mission never to give it up.

His story became Egypt’s story for the next 30 years until, finally, his people found they could write it themselves, in a revolution that shook the world and consigned him to history.

Unremarked vice president to the mercurial Anwar Sadat, he was a safety-first stopgap after Islamists gunned down the president beside him. Few thought he would last. Yet slowly, surviving attempts on his own life, he became “Pharaoh”, to preside over decades of stagnation and oppression on the Nile, offering his people a mantra - either Mubarak, or mayhem.

Many believed him, not just in Egypt. Successive US administrations, from Reagan to Obama, showered him - and the biggest army in the Middle East which kept him in his palaces - with billions of dollars in gratitude for his loyalty to Sadat’s Cold War switch of allegiance and historic peace with Israel.

But it was Mubarak’s struggles with the Islamists, who by killing Sadat accidentally handed power to a man who would spend decades suppressing them. This defined his politics, and the legacy his downfall bestowed on Egypt and the world at large.