Four Egyptian security officers are once again being tried in their absence in Rome for their involvement in the abduction and killing of an Italian student in Cairo.
Giulio Regeni, 28 years old, was doing research when he was kidnapped in January 2016. His body was discovered nine days later, left on the edge of the Egyptian capital, with severe signs of torture.
The killing greatly damaged the relationship between Italy and Egypt, and later, members of Italian Parliament accused Cairo of openly opposing efforts to prosecute the suspects.
The initial trial in 2021 was dismissed by Italian judges due to the failure of prosecutors to officially notify the four suspects of the legal proceedings against them. However, a major decision by the constitutional court in September stated that the trial could continue without formal notification to the defendants, as their location could not be determined by Egyptian authorities.
“We had been anticipating this moment for a span of eight years,” stated Regeni’s attorney, Alessandra Ballerini, during a press conference. “We are hopeful that we will finally have the opportunity to hold accountable those responsible for causing immense harm to Giulio.”
The four individuals listed in the initial legal papers were identified as General Tariq Sabir, Colonel Athar Kamel, Lieutenant Uhsam Helmi, and Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif. They are all accused of kidnapping, while Sharif also faces charges for causing the deadly harm.
In 2021, they will not be present at the trial. According to defence lawyer Tranquillino Sarno, who was appointed by the court to represent Kamel, they are completely untraceable. As a result, even if they are found guilty, they will not likely serve their sentences.
The trial’s witness lists include names such as Egyptian president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, and former foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni.
Regeni went to Cairo to study the involvement of street vendors in unions for his PhD dissertation. He went missing after leaving his apartment in Cairo’s Dokki neighborhood to meet up with friends. Despite a frantic search by his loved ones, his body was discovered on the side of a desert road on February 4th, bearing evidence of torture. His mother could only recognize him by “the tip of his nose”.
The precise nature of the torture that Regeni was subjected to and the location where his corpse was found, close to a detention facility used by Egypt’s national security agency, have long drawn suspicions internationally that members of Egypt’s security agencies were responsible for his murder. Yet at home, Egyptian officials offered a very different view.
In 2016, the Guardian interviewed Shaaban al-Shamy, the former vice-minister of justice and forensic expert, who stated that the security services would determine the perpetrator. Egypt eventually acknowledged that the student had been monitored prior to his passing.
The attempts of Italian prosecutors to investigate were hindered from the beginning. In January 2016, a team of Italian investigators was sent to Cairo, but they were unable to fully cooperate with their Egyptian counterparts. The initial autopsy on Regeni’s body was conducted in Egypt without any Italian officials present, forcing the Italian team to conduct a separate investigation.
Italian authorities made multiple requests for CCTV footage from the Cairo metro on the day that Regeni went missing. However, it was not until 2018 that Egypt finally provided the footage, which the Italians deemed to have “unexplained gaps” that made it unreliable as evidence.
In December 2021, a commission in the Italian parliament discovered that Egypt’s security agency was responsible for the death of Regeni. This finding came weeks after the initial trial had been dismissed. The commission also accused Egypt’s judiciary of hindering the investigation by not revealing the location of the defendants and displaying open hostility.
In December 2020, the public prosecutor in Egypt cleared all four suspects and an additional fifth individual of any involvement in Regeni’s murder. The prosecutor announced that he would be closing the case.
This report was contributed to by Associated Press and Agency France-Presse.
Source: theguardian.com
