27 March 2017•Update: 27 March 2017
By Yunus Hocaoglu
ERZURUM, Turkey
A key official of Turkey-based International Rabia Platform has slammed the release of Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak while saying the country's elected president remained imprisoned.
"While Egypt's elected president, Mohammed Morsi and his friends are in jail, Mubarak, who suppressed Egyptian people for decades, made human rights violations not an exception but a rule and established a dictatorship has been set free," Coordinator Cihangir Isbilir told Anadolu Agency on Sunday.
Mubarak left a military hospital in southern Cairo on Friday, returning home for the first time since being forced to step down after a 2011 popular uprising.
Isbilir said it would be "naive" to think that the current Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was the "only" one behind Mubarak's release.
"The actors who want to preserve the regional status quo and support Sisi are also behind this ruling," he said, adding these practices increased "the risk of social explosion in Egypt day by day".
"Egypt has shelved democracy altogether," he said.
Earlier this month, an Egyptian prosecutor ordered Mubarak’s release from custody.
Mubarak, who ruled Egypt for more than three decades, was forced to relinquish executive power to the army in February 2011 after 18 days of countrywide protests.
Two months later, he was put on trial to face multiple charges, including corruption, abuse of power and involvement in the murder of hundreds of anti-regime demonstrators by Egyptian security forces.
After several trials, appeals and retrials, however, he was ultimately cleared of the charges against him.
The only charge of which he was convicted was the illegal appropriation of state funds to refurbish several of his family’s lavish personal residences.
In 2012, an Egyptian court slapped Mubarak with a life sentence for ordering his security forces to fire on demonstrators at the height of the uprising.
An appeals court, however, ordered a retrial in 2014 and he was acquitted of this charge, too, earlier this month.
