Egypt’s former President Hosni Mubarak returned home, Friday, a freeman following his release from custody.

Mubarak who had been in detention since his ouster in 2011 was slammed with corruption and murder charges.

He left the Armed Forces hospital in Cairo’s southern suburb of Maadi earlier in the morning. From there, he went to his house in the upscale district of Heliopolis under heavy security measures.

Mubarak’s lawyer, Farid el-Deeb, told the Egyptian daily Al-Masry al-Youm that the ailing former president returned home with his two sons, Alaa and Gamal, and that the entire family, including Mubarak’s wife Suzanne came together at his house to celebrate his return and have breakfast together.

The 88-year-old Mubarak was acquitted by Egypt’s top appeals court on March 2 of charges that he ordered the killing of protesters during the 2011 popular uprising that led to his ouster.

Prosecutors, however, reopened another corruption case on Thursday, linked to allegations that Mubarak received gifts from the state-run Al-Ahram newspaper worth $1 million, along with his family members. The case was closed before the prosecutors appealed and the case restarted.

The order to release Mubarak was the latest in a series of court rulings in recent years in Egypt that acquitted some two dozen, Mubarak-era cabinet ministers, top police officers and aides charged with graft or in connection with the killing of some 900 protesters during the uprising.

Some of those acquitted have made a comeback in public life, while others partially paid back fortunes they illegally amassed and subsequently faced trial since his ouster in 2011 after legal proceedings that took years since his 2011 ouster — years during which the country witnessed major upheavals and rights activists saw their hopes scuttled that the autocrat would face justice for the deaths of hundreds who defied his rule.

Activists are of the view that  Mubarak’s acquittal of killing protesters confirms  long-held suspicions that his trial — and that of scores of policemen who faced trial on the same charge — would never bring the justice they demanded.

It has also, according to activists and Egypt’s beleaguered rights campaigners, confirmed widely-held suspicions that their “revolution” — as the uprising against Mubarak was dubbed — had effectively been reversed by the government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, a general-turned-politician, in order to restore the status quo in a country ruled undemocratically by men of military background for most of the past 60-plus years.

Powerful media figures loyal to el-Sissi have relentlessly vilified the 2011 uprising as a conspiracy and demonized its icons as foreign agents who pose a threat to the country’s national security. The fallen protesters, contend some of them, were shot by members of the now-banned Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood.

The attacks began soon after el-Sissi, as army chief, led the 2013 ouster of the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, after Mubarak Egypt’s first freely elected leader whose one-year in office proved divisive.

Mubarak’s sons were also convicted and sentenced to three years in prison in the same embezzlement case.