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Theatre ends: Court in Egypt orders release of Mubarak sons

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An Egyptian court has ordered the release of the two sons of the ousted dictator, Hosni Mubarak.

Their lawyer, Farid al-Deeb, said Alaa and Gamal Mubarak were free to leave a prison in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, on Thursday.

Judicial sources say the brothers were released because they had already served the maximum pretrial detention period.

An appeals court earlier this month overturned a lower court conviction that saw the two given four-year jail sentences for corruption. The court also dismissed the corruption charges leveled against Hosni Mubarak. In a ruling, the court also ordered the retrial of Mubarak and his two sons.

In May 2014, a lower court convicted Mubarak of embezzling about USD 14 million originally allocated to repairing presidential palaces during his tenure as the president of the country.

In December last year, protests rocked Egypt following an appeals court ruling that cleared Mubarak in a case involving the killing of protesters during the 2011 revolution, which resulted in his ouster.

The court also overturned the life sentence Mubarak and his co-defendants had received in June 2012. In a final verdict hearing in a Cairo court on June 2, the ex-dictator as well as former interior minister, Habib al-Adli, had been sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing of around 900 protesters during the uprising.

The lawyers say Mubarak himself, who is at a military hospital, would be also a free man very son. However, the Egyptian local media reports say that there have been no orders yet for release of the former longtime ruler.

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