Egypt’s Mubarak dies
CAIRO: Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has died at the age of 91 after undergoing treatment in an intensive care unit following surgery, state television said yesterday.
Mubarak ruled Egypt for 30 years until he was ousted following mass protests in 2011.
He was arrested in April 2011, two months after stepping down, and was in prison and military hospitals until 2017, when he was freed after being cleared of charges of ordering the killing of protesters.
CAIRO: Hosni Mubarak, who became Egypt’s longest-serving ruler in more than 150 years before being forced from office by a popular uprising, has died. He was 91.
His death was announced yesterday by state TV. No cause was mentioned, although his family recently said he’d been hospitalised.
Dubbed the “pharaoh” by his detractors, Mubarak had ruled for 30 years and was widely accepted to be preparing his younger son Gamal as successor when the Arab Spring surged into Cairo in January 2011. After 18 days of mass protests, he was gone, his image of an all-powerful ruler shredded.
Mubarak attended his trial for the killing of more than 850 protesters by security forces in the final days of his regime in a hospital bed and faced other serious charges, but was only found guilty of fraud and avoided serving additional time in jail.
Mubarak was born on May 4, 1928, in Kafr El Meselha in the Nile Delta. Opting for a military career when Egypt was still a monarchy, he entered the Air Force Academy in 1950. Four years later, King Farouk was overthrown in a coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser.
In 1964, Mubarak was appointed head of the Egyptian military delegation to the Soviet Union, the sole supplier of weapons to Nasser’s regime. From 1967 to 1972, he served as air force chief of staff, became deputy minister for military affairs and was promoted to air marshal after the 1973 Arab-Israel war.
After Nasser’s death, Egypt was led by President Anwar Sadat, who appointed Mubarak as vice president in April 1975, effectively designating him as heir apparent. That succession came earlier than expected, with Sadat gunned down on Oct 6, 1981.
Critics saw him as out of touch with most Egyptians — embracing the elite while the poor were left to grapple with an inflation rate that reached more than 20% in 2008. His supporters blamed explosive population growth and the economic mismanagement of past administrations for the ills of a nation that grew to 85 million people by the time of Mubarak’s ouster.
Mubarak never backtracked on the diplomatic rapprochement with Israel, though his only visit to the Jewish state was for the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. He managed to restore links with Arab rulers who were enraged by Sadat’s decision to sign a peace treaty with Israel.
“There isn’t among us anyone who wants to take the region back to the destruction of war or to the phase of no war and no peace,” he told Arab leaders in 1996. “We are determined to struggle for peace until the end.”