FORMER Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has been freed from detention six years after being forced from office in the Arab Spring.
The 88-year-old’s lawyer said he had left a military hospital in Cairo for his home in the north of the city almost one month after appeal judges cleared him over the deaths of 900 protestors in the 2011 revolt.
Mubarak, who spent 30 years in power, left the Maadi Military Hospital under heavy security for a celebratory breakfast with his wife and sons. He had been held there since 2013, one year after being given a life sentence for complicity in the deaths of protesters killed by security forces.
However, he was acquitted of ordering the killings by the country’s leading appeals court earlier this month.
During his time in detention, Mubarak served a three-year sentence for embezzling state funds.
He was also fined millions of Egyptian pounds by a criminal court in May 2015 following his conviction for taking monies earmarked for the maintenance and renovation of presidential palaces. The ruling was upheld by another court in January last year.
Prosecutors have now reopened another corruption case linked to allegations that he took gifts from the state-run Al-Ahram newspaper worth £800,000, along with his family members. The case had been closed but the prosecutors appealed and it has now restarted.
Current president Abdul Fattah al-Sisi was reportedly reluctant to release him for fear of triggering a public backlash. Sisi, who was Mubarak’s military intelligence chief, led the 2013 military overthrow of his democratically-elected successor Mohammed Morsi.
Critics claim Sisi has reversed their revolution by installing another undemocratic regime.
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