Member of Freedoms Committee of the lawyer's syndicate, Naser Al-Askalani, withdrew a lawsuit he had filed against National Salvation Front (NSF) leaders for attempting to overthrow the regime. Al-Askalani had filed the lawsuit with the Prosecutor General Tala'at Abdallah upon the death of eight people in the presidential palace clashes. He accused Hamdeen Sabahy, Mohamed ElBaradei, Amr Moussa and other leaders of the NSF, of inciting people to overthrow the regime and staging a coup against legitimacy. After reading the statements of different political groups, Al-Askalani feared more bloodshed; he believed what was happening was a part of a conspiracy against the Egyptian state, reported state-run Al-Ahram. Al-Askalani said that the withdrawal was due to his respect for democracy and opposition. He reasoned the move with four aspects, respect for freedom of expression, the fact the opposition was the one to remove Mubarak's dictatorship and bring President Mohamed Morsy to power and finally, because the opposition represents the key to democracy in Egypt. Media spokesperson of the Popular Current, Heba Yassin, said that these were all false accusations to distort the image of the opposition. “He claimed those people were traitors conspiring against their country and now he respects them because they represent the opposition, is this logic?" Yassin said. She added that the real reason behind the withdrawal was to avoid exposing those who had paid him to claim those lies. Clashes had occurred outside the presidential palace on 5 December which led to the death of eight protesters. Besides this controversial lawsuit, Al-Askalani was one of the main civil right prosecutors in the revolutionary martyrs' lawsuit against former President Hosni Mubarak and his minister of interior Habib El-Adly.
