By Ebi Kesiena
Egyptian authorities Tuesday released the country’s former anti-graft chief after he served a five-year prison term for allegedly insulting and disseminating false news about the military, his lawyers said.
Hesham Genena, a former judge, walked free from a police station and returned to his home in Cairo’s eastern New Cairo district, lawyer Hossam Lotfy said.
His daughter, Shorouk Genena, posted images in Facebook showing her father hugging his family. “Baba is out, finally,” she wrote.
Genena was taken Tuesday to the country’s Supreme State Security Prosecution following his release from a prison, where he was questioned over separate allegations of disseminating false news, said another lawyer Naser Amin.
The allegations are related to comments he made in 2016 on the scale of government corruption, Amin said. Prosecutors ordered his release pending an investigation, he added.
Genena, who was arrested in February 2018, served a five-year sentence on a conviction of insulting the military. The conviction was related to incendiary comments in which he claimed that the military’s former chief-of-staff, Sami Annan, was in possession of documents incriminating the country’s leadership. He said the documents were kept abroad.
