Egypt’s innocent murderers
BY OMAR ASHOUR Cairo: “Bashar should abandon power and retire safely in Egypt. The general-prosecutor is murder-friendly,” a friend, referring to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, told me as we watched former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s trial in the Police Academy’s criminal court. Although Mubarak and his interior (security) minister, Habib al-Adly, were handed life sentences at the conclusion of their trials, the generals who ran Egypt’s apparatus of repression as deputy interior ministers were acquitted. Hasan Abdel Rahman, head of the notorious, Stasi-like State Security Investigations (SSI); Ahmad Ramzi, head of the Central Security Forces (CSF); Adly Fayyid, the head…
Mubarak and the “verdict of the century”
BY RANIA AL MALKY Cairo: Egyptians waiting to hear the thundering bang of the judge’s gavel announcing a guilty verdict against Mubarak his two sons and his security chiefs, shouldn’t hold their breath. Days before the verdict in the trial of the century — a superlative misnomer — three starkly revealing issues dominate the city chatter, everywhere from virtual social networks to the coffee shops lining the capital’s winding alleys: the unexpected ascension of Mubarak’s last Prime Minister and unabashed loyal subject Ahmed Shafiq to the second round of the presidential race; the commuted five-year sentence handed down to policeman…
