Earlier this year, Egypt’s central elections committee ruled that former Egyptian vice president would not be able to run in the presidential elections.
Mubarak’s most senior officials, died in the United States where he was undergoing medical tests, Suleiman’s assistant told Reuters on Thursday.
“He was fine. It came suddenly while he was having medical tests in Cleveland,” said the aide, Hussein Kamal, without giving a reason for Suleiman’s death.
The former intelligence chief, 76, stepped briefly into the limelight when he was made vice president days before Mubarak was ousted in a popular uprising last year.
On April of this year, Egypt’s central elections committee ruled that former Suleiman would not be able to run in the presidential elections.
The thus struck a final blow to Suleiman’s presidential hopes, along with those of popular Safai candidate Hazem Abu Ismail.
The ruling came following appeals submitted by several candidates after the election commission barred them from running, shaking up an already tumultuous race and political transition.
Ultraconservative Islamist candidate Abu Ismail, the more mainstream Islamist Khairat al-Shater of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Suleiman were knocked out of the race along with seven others on Saturday on legal grounds.
The decision to disqualify the candidates – along with the possibility that it might again be reversed on appeal – has injected massive uncertainty into Egypt’s first-ever freely contested presidential elections.
That decision was upheld by the country’s election panel, al-Ahram said, with a ruling which effectively ends Suleiman’s and Abu Ismail’s presidential hopes.
In addition, the report claimed that final decision were reached in eight of ten appeals submitted, with decisions concern two other key candidates, including the Muslim Brotherhood’s Khairat al-Shater, to be announced later in the day.
