Judicial authorities ruled Monday that Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president who was thrown out of office by the Arab Spring protests in early 2011, has spent too much time in custody after one of the initial charges against him was dropped.

Mubarak ruled Egypt from October 1981 until roughly two-and-a-half years ago. During his trial in 2011, he was charged with “intentional murder, attempted killing of some demonstrators … misuse of influence and deliberately wasting public funds and unlawfully making private financial gains and profits.” In June 2012, Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison for not putting a stop to the killing of protesters, but an appeals court overturned that punishment in January.

The former president, who is 85 years old and in poor health, still faces a retrial on charges of complicity in the killing of demonstrators during the 2011 revolt.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

The Guardian:

News of Mubarak’s imminent release looks likely to inflame a highly volatile mood in Egypt. It comes after the army’s clearance of two Cairo protest camps last week, which sparked bloodshed in which at least 900 people have been killed, and unprecedented polarisation following the military’s removal of the elected Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, last month.

On a day in which 26 policemen were gunned down in the Sinai peninsula, apparently by a jihadi group, and furious responses to the deaths on Sunday of 36 detained members of the Brotherhood, Mubarak’s lawyer, Fareed el-Deeb, said his client would be freed after the Cairo criminal court ordered his release in one of the remaining corruption cases against him.

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