CAIRO — Egypt’s chief prosecutor withdrew his resignation on Thursday, just days after submitting it. The move was the latest bizarre turn in a complicated three-way struggle among the new Islamist president, the institutions of the old government and the president’s opposition in the streets.
President Mohamed Morsi appointed the prosecutor, Talaat Ibrahim Abdullah, in a Nov. 22 decree that set off protests across the country and prompted a political crisis because it also sought to exempt presidential edicts from judicial scrutiny.
Mr. Abdullah’s role drew more critical attention after a night of deadly violence between Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters and their opponents outside the presidential palace this month. A local Cairo prosecutor accused Mr. Abdullah and Mr. Morsi’s chief of staff of pressing for legal action without adequate evidence against a group of opposition protesters that the Islamists had captured during the battle. When the pressure was rebuffed, the local prosecutor said that Mr. Abdullah had briefly sought to punish him by transferring him to a remote town in Upper Egypt.
Other prosecutors accused the Morsi government of trying to turn law enforcement into a political tool, and on Monday they staged an angry protest at the door of the high court building where Mr. Abdullah works. Dozens of riot police officers stood guard. After hours of confrontations on the street and in his office, Mr. Abdullah wrote out a letter of resignation, and the crowd left in triumph.
In response, Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters denounced the forced resignation as mob rule. “What street thugs do these days,” was how Mr. Morsi’s party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, described it in a statement. The party also accused the prosecutors of brandishing weapons to intimidate Mr. Abdullah. Witnesses said they did see not any weapons.
If groups of public employees were allowed to force out their bosses, “the whole country would descend into total chaos, governed by the law of the jungle,” the party said. It called judges who had opposed the appointment “enemies of the revolution” and “enemies of the people” because they favored the return of the former chief prosecutor, appointed by Hosni Mubarak and faulted for failing to pursue his cronies.
Evidently pushed by the Morsi government and its supporters not to resign, Mr. Abdullah said Thursday that his earlier resignation had been illegitimate because it occurred “under pressure” from the angry lawyers outside his office, Egyptian state news media reported.
The reversal is likely to raise new alarms about Mr. Morsi’s efforts to tighten his grip on power, days before the conclusion on Saturday of a two-phase referendum on an Islamist-backed draft constitution.
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Egypt’s Chief Prosecutor Retracts His Resignation
