CAIRO, April 8 - RAPSI, Rafael Daminov. The Cairo Criminal Court has acquitted former Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik on a charge of embezzling public money when he was civil aviation minister from 2002 to 2012, a court official said on Sunday.

Shafik, who was a presidential candidate in 2012, left for Abu Dhabi last June after his opponent, the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Mursi, was elected president. He was tried in absentia on charges that he, former Civil Aviation Minister Ibrahim Mannaa and former Egypt Air head Tawfiq el-Asi embezzled over 23 million Egyptian pounds ($3.4 million). All three were found not guilty, Reuters reports from Cairo.

Shafik still faces a charge of corruption over his alleged allocation of 40,000 square meters of state land to former president Hosni Mubarak's sons Alaa and Gamal, who are already in prison on corruption charges.

In February, Egypt's Prosecutor General sent a request to Interpol and the United Arab Emirates to detain Shafik, but Interpol refused to put him on the wanted list due to possible political motives in this criminal case.