Egypt’s Mubarak-era minister freed after four years

Egypt’s former interior minister under deposed dictator Hosni Mubarak, who has spent four years behind bars, is set free after a Cairo criminal court recently cleared him of several charges, including a number of corruption cases.

Habib el-Adly, generally infamous for being a glorified butcher, was released on Wednesday days after he was acquitted on charges of using his political influence to acquire illicit gains amounting to 181 million Egyptian pounds ($23.72 million).

Adly led Egypt’s notoriously brutal internal security forces from 1997 until the 2011 popular uprising, which finally drove Mubarak from power.

After the revolution, he was charged with a number of felonies, including the killing of unarmed civilian demonstrators during anti-government protests, for which he was initially sentenced to life in prison. Last November, a court dropped the charges against him.

On February 24, an Egyptian court also exonerated Adly of charges that he had improperly awarded a $12 million contract for the manufacture of license plates to a German company without an open bidding process.

Egypt’s first democratically-elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was toppled in a military coup led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the North African country’s current president and then army commander, on July 3, 2013.

Following Morsi’s ouster, Sisi announced his candidacy for the nation’s presidency and was sworn in as president after winning an election in which less than 50 percent of eligible voters participated.

Supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood gesture from the defendant’s cage as they receive sentences during a mass trial in Alexandria, Egypt, on May 19, 2014. (© AP)

The Egyptian government has been cracking down on any opposition since Morsi’s downfall. Sisi has been accused of leading the suppression of Morsi supporters, as hundreds of them have been killed in clashes with Egyptian security forces over the past year.

Rights groups say the army’s crackdown on the supporters of Morsi has led to the deaths of over 1,400 people and the arrest of 22,000 others, including some 200 people who have been sentenced to death in mass trials.