Four Egyptian security officials have appeared again in absentia in Rome on charges related to the kidnapping and murder of an Italian student in Cairo.
Giulio Regeni, 28, was conducting an investigation when he was abducted in January 2016. His body was found dumped on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital nine days later, bearing extensive signs of torture.
The murder severely strained relations between Italy and Egypt, with Italian lawmakers later accusing Cairo of being “openly hostile” to attempts to bring the suspects to justice.
An Italian judge dismissed the case on the opening day of the first trial in 2021 because prosecutors failed to formally inform the four suspects of the proceedings against them. However, in a landmark ruling by the Constitutional Court last September, it was decided that the trial could proceed without formal notification of the defendants because the Egyptian authorities had not provided them with a location.
“We have been waiting for this moment for eight years,” Regeni’s lawyer Alessandra Ballerini told reporters. “We hope that justice will finally be brought to justice for those who caused Julio all the harm he caused around the world.”
The four defendants are named in the original court documents as General Tariq Sabir, Colonels Athar Kamel and Oussam Helmi, and Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif. All have been charged with kidnapping, and Sharif has also been charged with inflicting grievous bodily harm.
As in 2021, he will not attend the trial. “They are completely untraceable,” Tranquilino Sarno, a lawyer appointed by the court to represent Kamel, said last week. For this reason, he said, even if he were found guilty, he would “certainly not serve his sentence.”
The list of witnesses submitted by the parties to the trial includes Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and former Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni.
Regeni had traveled to Cairo to research union activity among street vendors as part of his doctoral thesis. He went missing after leaving his apartment in Cairo’s Dokki district to meet his friend. After a frantic search by his parents and friends, his body was found on the side of a desert highway on February 4, with signs of torture. his mother said She could identify him only from “the tip of his nose.”
The exact nature of the torture Regeni was subjected to and the vicinity of where his body was found. Jail It was used by Egypt’s National Security Agency, and there have long been suspicions internationally that members of the Egyptian security services were involved in his murder. But at home, Egyptian officials took a very different view.
“It is up to the security authorities to say who did it,” Shaban al-Shami, then deputy justice minister and forensic expert, told the Guardian in 2016. Admitted The student was said to have been placed under surveillance before his death.
Italian prosecutors’ investigative efforts were frustrated from the beginning. Italy sent a team of investigators to Cairo in January 2016, but has not cooperated fully with the Egyptian team, which conducted the first autopsy of Regeni’s body in Egypt without Egyptian officials present. Instead, they were forced to conduct parallel investigations.
Italian investigators have repeatedly requested CCTV footage from the Cairo metro on the day Regeni disappeared. When Egypt finally provided the document in 2018, it contained what the Italian side described as “unexplained gaps” and was useless as evidence.
An Italian parliamentary committee held Egyptian security services responsible for Regeni’s death in December 2021, weeks after the initial trial was dismissed. Egypt’s judicial authorities did not reveal the defendants’ whereabouts and accused them of acting in a “disruptive and openly hostile manner.”
In December 2020, Egyptian prosecutors said they would exonerate all four suspects and a fifth suspect in Regeni’s murder and drop the case.
The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
