Accused Americans Leave Egypt, Officials Say

CAIRO — Americans who had been stuck in Egypt left the country Thursday evening after Egyptian officials lifted a travel ban imposed as part of a politically charged criminal case against four nonprofit groups here, a senior official with the Obama administration and witnesses at the airport said.

A lawyer involved in the case said one of the seven Americans who was cleared to leave chose to stay behind, but there was no immediate confirmation of that from Washington.

The Americans were allowed to go after they agreed to return for their trial and after nearly $5 million in bail was posted.

The United States provided a chartered plane, but a diplomat traveling with the Americans suggested some of the people leaving may have gone on other aircraft.

The news followed several hours of confusion.

Egyptian officials had said on Wednesday night that the travel ban would be lifted in an apparent effort to resolve a crisis that has threatened the country’s 30-year alliance with Washington. But by late afternoon Thursday, the ban remained in place without explanation. The Americans remained holed up in the American Embassy for fear of arrest and imprisonment.

A domestic political backlash against the capitulation to American pressure had picked up steam throughout the day.

It was unclear whether the delay in lifting the ban reflected bureaucratic sluggishness or a fear of the backlash.

Planes were waiting at the airport here for the Americans, who include the son of the secretary of transportation, to carry them out of the country and beyond the reach of the Egyptian authorities.

Their departure had been expected to cool the escalating crisis, which could have regional implications. The United States had threatened to cut off the $1.3 billion in annual aid to Egypt’s military, and the Egyptians had retaliated by warning that they would reconsider the American -brokered treaty with Israel.

Bail was posted as part of the deal allowing the Americans to leave the country, and they pledged to return for their trial. The lifting of the ban does not resolve charges against the nonprofit groups or their roughly dozen Egyptian employees, nor does it erase the fear among the many advocacy groups that have come under the same investigation.

At a time when Egyptians are demanding a new independence for their judiciary after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian courts appear instead to have bent to political pressure.

“To those who talk about sovereignty and independence: no matter what the circumstances surrounding the judicial indictment were, interfering in its work is a fatal strike to democracy,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former diplomat who is a leading liberal here, wrote Thursday in an online commentary.

His comments reflected the growing political backlash, fueled in part by inflammatory accusations from officials pressing the case that the American nonprofits were collaborating with spies to weaken Egypt for the benefit of the United States and Israel. On Wednesday, the office of the Egyptian public prosecutor issued a statement distancing him from the decision, and by Thursday the judges who had begun hearing the case had disavowed the decision as well.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that now leads the Egyptian Parliament, called for an investigation into who authorized the lifting of the travel ban and who allowed planes to land to fetch the defendants. In a statement to a morning television program and posted on the group’s Web site, Akram el Shaer, a Brotherhood member of parliament, said he felt “sad and disappointed” by the news.

The order to lift the travel ban follows weeks of increasingly tense diplomatic wrangling as American officials confronted what they came to describe as a vacuum of authority in the final months before the military council is to hand power to an elected president. Until the last moment before the announcement, the military leaders, top diplomats and senior judicial officials all professed that they could not interfere until the investigation had run its course.

“One of our problems is we don’t really have an Egyptian government to have a conversation with,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in testimony Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “And I keep reminding myself of that, because it is an uncertain situation for all the different players.”

The New York Times