“It is a reaction,” said Islam Lotfy, a leader of the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood .

The military council, led by Mr. Mubarak’s former defense minister, is now running the country, and the charges against Mr. Mubarak are the strongest indication yet that Egyptian officials are moving to distance themselves from their former leaders even before the parliamentary elections expected this fall. The charges accused Mr. Mubarak of killing protesters “by agreeing with Habib el-Adly, the former interior minister, and some police leaders,” suggesting that some may even have testified against the former president.

Mr. Adly, deeply despised and once widely feared, has already been sentenced to 12 years in prison for corruption and awaits trial on a second charge of directing the killing of civilians. Adel el-Said, a spokesman for the prosecutor, declined to comment, except to say that no interior minister could have ordered the killing of unarmed civilians without the president’s consent.

About 850 people died, many from police bullets, during the 18 days of demonstrations that brought down Mr. Mubarak, according to Egyptian officials.

Mr. Mubarak is charged with conspiring “with premeditation” to kill “peaceful” demonstrators, and also with “inciting some officers and members of the police to fire their weapons at the victims, shoot them and run over them with vehicles, and to kill some of them in order to terrorize the rest and force them to relinquish their demands.”

The corruption charges evidently date back many years and involve Hussein Salem, a billionaire landowner and ally of Mr. Mubarak. Mr. Salem, who is also charged with corruption, left Egypt before he was implicated in any wrongdoing. An Interpol arrest warrant has reportedly been issued.

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The first corruption charge relates to a large tract of prime land on the Red Sea coast of the South Sinai area, around Sharm el Sheik. Prosecutors charge that Mr. Mubarak exploited his influence to allow Mr. Salem to buy at a deeply discounted price from the Egyptian government in a privatization deal. In return Mr. Salem provided the Mubaraks with a five luxury villas— four for the two sons worth 14 million Egyptian pounds, or about $2.4 million, and a 161,000-square-foot mansion for Mr. Mubarak worth roughly $4.5 million.

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The second corruption charge concerns a separate deal for the sale of natural gas to Israel that has been the subject of rumors and suspicions here for years. In this case, prosecutors charge, Mr. Mubarak enabled a middleman company in which Mr. Salem owned a large stake to buy natural gas from the Egyptian government below market price. Mr. Salem’s company may have then resold the gas to Israel at a substantial mark-up, thus enriching himself at the public expense, although the prosecutors’ statement is unclear on those details.

The deal cheated Egypt of $714 million in lost revenue, prosecutors say, but Mr. Salem himself made far more than that. After his company’s role in the gas deal became known, he sold his stake for a profit of $2 billion. The charges did not address Mr. Mubarak’s interest in the deal, other than in helping enrich a friend.

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Until now, Mr. Mubarak has been under indefinite detention while recovering from a heart attack in a hospital near his Sharm el Sheik home. The prosecutors said Tuesday that a medical team was examining Mr. Mubarak this week to see if he was fit for transfer to a Cairo prison. His sons and more than a dozen former associates are already waiting behind bars in a prison that had housed political dissidents during the Mubarak era.

The organizers of the Tahrir Square demonstrations have called their planned protest this Friday “the Second Egyptian Revolution” or “the Revolution Part II,” to reiterate a long list of unmet demands, including the prosecution of Mr. Mubarak but also an end to military trials and postponing planned parliamentary elections to give new parties more time to organize.

“The military is trying to give us something to abort what is going to happen on Friday,” Shedy el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the organizers, said. “O.K., it is not a bad step,” he added, “but not good enough to stop us from challenging them about how they are running the country.”