Speculation that former President Hosni Mubarak had departed Egypt for Saudi Arabia heightened Wednesday with a banner headline in a government-owned newspaper saying that he had left his villa in the Red Sea resort city of Sharm el Sheik.

The newspaper, Al Akhbar, said that Mr. Mubarak and his immediate family had gone late last week to a special Saudi military complex at Tabuk, just across the Straits of Tiran but inland, for chemotherapy treatment by his usual German doctors. He is suffering from pancreatic and colon cancer, it said.

Rumors about Mr. Mubarak’s whereabouts and health have been rife since he left the presidency on Feb. 11, with the new military government keeping a tight lid on the subject. He and his family have not been seen in public or heard from since he stepped down.

There was no official confirmation of the report, though Egyptian analysts gave it some credence, saying there might be two reasons other than his health for Mr. Mubarak’s going to Saudi Arabia. One would be to perform umrah, the off-season pilgrimage to Mecca often undertaken by Muslims.

The second would be that the military council now running Egypt knew that the general prosecutor was about to freeze all the family’s domestic assets and bar them from traveling, and the senior officers wanted to get him and his family out of the country before that happened, limiting their options.

The public prosecutor announced Monday that he was investigating bank accounts worth millions of dollars that the Mubarak family maintained in a bank branch near the presidential palace. The prosecutor emphasized that the money might have been legally earned. But if any of it turns out to be tainted, there will be public pressure for a trial.

(Source: NY Times)