From: PakNationalists Group <paknationalists@gmail.com>
To: PakNationalists <PakNationalists@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wed, April 13, 2011 6:45:06 PM
Subject: PakNationalists - Judiciary & Military Arrests President, His Sons
EXCLUSIVE: When Mubarak Collapsed In Front Of Investigators
· Judiciary and Military Arrest The President; Break New Ground
· Mubarak's Sons And Top Cabinet Members In Jail For Amassing Illegal Wealth
· Alaa and Jamaal In The Same Jail Where Opponents Of Their Father Were Tortured
· Suzanne Thabet, Mubarak's Wife Known For Corruption And Ruthlessness, Is Being Interrogated
· Top Names Of Egyptian Elite In The Same Jail As Mubarak Sons
SPECIAL REPORT | Thursday | 14 April 2011
DUBAI, UAE—Egypt's judiciary and military-backed government broke new ground when Alaa and Jamal, sons of ousted president Hosni Mubarak, were jailed yesterday in Cairo, handcuffed and wearing standard prison jumpsuits. This was the first sign of a major cleanup at the top of Egypt's power elite.
Egyptians have long feared the Tora prison on the outskirts of Cairo as a symbol of Mubarak's power and the place where his political opponents were tortured.
But yesterday, Mubarak's own sons, until recently very powerful and feared, were led to Tora. Their father was to join them in jail but instead he is under bed arrest at a military hospital where investigators remanded him for 15 days to investigate his role in ordering the clampdown on Egyptian protesters that resulted in the murder of hundreds.
Here, PakNationalists.com publishes nuggets of exclusive details about how the family of the former president received the news of their arrest along with key figures in the Mubarak regime, like the former prime minister and the former parliament speaker.
Most of these details mentioned here took place in Sharm el Sheikh early morning on Tuesday. The information is gleaned from eyewitness accounts in Cairo and Sharm el-Sheikh,
HOW MUBARAK RECEIVED THE NEWS
Mubarak heard of the order by the prosecutor general for his arrest along with his sons, but it wasn't until he saw the investigators arriving at his Sharm el Sheikh residence that he finally collapsed. The standby medical team got alarmed at Mubarak's increased heartbeats and rising blood pressure and he was immediately taken to the nearby Sharm el Sheikh international hospital.
Suzanne Mubarak, his wife and once one of the most powerful women in the regime, began crying loud as soon as her husband fell to the ground. The security detail and the investigators dealt humanely with the situation, helping the former president to a sofa. Within a few minutes, a black limousine was rushing him to the hospital. Once his condition stabilized, Mubarak was transferred to suite number 309 so that the interrogation could begin.
Egyptian police and military was quick to seal all entry points to Mubarak's room fearing that around 400 protesters gathered outside the hospital might try to storm the building and hurt the former president. As doctors tended to Mubarak, the screams of the protesters outside could be clearly heard as they shouted demanding that Mubarak be expelled from the hospital and the city itself.
According to eyewitnesses, Mubarak could clearly hear the shouting and at one point his eyes were overwhelmed with tears as his wife Suzanne continued to pat him on his shoulders. The scene was too charged even for the medical team that has been on the standby for the 80-year-old former president. Several attendants and team members were seen crying.
As soon as the senior doctor at the hospital testified that Mubarak's condition was normal, the investigators from the prosecutor-general's office occupied the seats around the former president's bed to begin the probe into his role in killing protesters. Another team waited in Cairo to ask the former president questions about his wealth and a long list of corruption charges.
Despite being in near collapse, Mubarak treated the investigators well and asked for refreshments. At the same time, another group of investigators led his sons Alaa and Jamaal to another room where they faced a tough time for several hours, dodging questions about their huge wealth. After the meeting, the two were served orders by the prosecutor-general putting them under arrest for 15 days in jail pending the probe. Police arrested Alaa and Jamaal and led them away. Their mother, who was yet to be interrogated, came running to them and shouted, "No, No, this can't be …' when told her sons were under arrest.
According to eyewitness accounts, Mubarak tried to convince the interrogators to convert the arrest orders of his sons into house arrest. But the interrogators insisted they had specific orders to arrest Alaa Mubarak and Jamal Mubarak and bring them to Cairo handcuffed. This was probably one of the most difficult moments for him.
ALAA AND JAMAAL IN JAIL
The order of the prosecutor-general to arrest former president Hosni Mubarak for 15 days is a landmark event in the popular uprising in Egypt, but it was the arrest of his two sons and the way they were brought from Sharm el Sheikh to the Tora jail in Cairo that captured the imaginations of the Egyptians.
Alaa and Jamaal and their wives and inlaws, along with their mother Suzanne Thabet, were the most corrupt figures of Hosni Mubarak's government, followed by his key lieutenants in government, all the way down to the parliament speaker and key leaders of the ruling party.
Alaa and Jamaal were known to pocket money from wealthy foreign investors in exchange for government investment concessions. Their mother headed a government-backed NGO and was known to have skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign aid that the NGO received. She was especially famous for crude way of treating the staff of the presidential palace.
Mubarak was grooming one of his sons to succeed him in power. So imagine the surprise of the Egyptian people to see Alaa and Jamaal in handcuffs and jumpsuits being led to the Tora prison. No one has captured this image more perfectly than Jack Shenker of the Guardian newspaper.
He wrote describing the scene:
"The barbed wire fences and forbidding high walls became a horrifyingly familiar sight to those who dared speak out over the past three decades; for many of the thousands who passed through Cairo's Tora prison complex and were tortured within it, this notorious jail was the ultimate symbol of Hosni Mubarak's Egypt.
On Wednesday, as it has done so many times before, Tora received two more prisoners accused of crimes against the state. Their names were Gamal and Alaa Mubarak, sons of the ousted president, and they arrived in the early hours, handcuffed and clad in standard-issue white jumpsuits."
A joke making the rounds in Cairo these days is that former president Mubarak will soon be in a position to hold the first meeting of his ousted cabinet in the Tora prison because of the large number of figures from his regime behind bars, including the former prime minister, the former parliament speaker, among others.
EXPELLED FROM PARTY
The National Party, which ruled Egypt for three decades under Mubarak, took a major step yesterday by formally expelling the former president, his two sons, and 22 other senior leaders from the party on permanent basis. All of the 22, including the president and his sons, are under arrest for corruption.
The Egyptian judiciary and the military-led interim government appeared reluctant in the past weeks in putting Mubarak on trial. But thanks to the perseverance of Egypt's pro-reform movement, and especially the younger generation of Egyptians, Mubarak and his entire family is under arrest for corruption and murder.
Another remarkable thing the Egyptian people have done is to support the extra-constitutional intervention by the judiciary and the military to reform the Constitution to make it more democratic and suited to Egypt's political environment before holding any elections.
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