Trial opens in Rome of four Egyptians accused over Giulio Regeni killing

Italy will again attempt to secure justice for an Italian student kidnapped and murdered in Cairo with the opening on Tuesday of a second trial of four Egyptian security officers accused over the killing.

Giulio Regeni, 28, had been conducting research when he was abducted in January 2016. His body was found nine days later, dumped on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital, bearing extensive signs of torture.

The murder severely strained ties between Italy and Egypt, and Italian MPs later accused Cairo of being “openly hostile” to attempts to try the suspects.

Italian judges threw out the first trial the day it opened in 2021 because prosecutors had not been able to officially inform the four suspects of the procedures against them. But the constitutional court ruled in September that the case could go ahead even in their absence, and the new trial will open on Tuesday in Rome.

The four defendants were named in original court documents as Gen Tariq Sabir, Cols Athar Kamel and Uhsam Helmi, and Maj Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif. They all face charges of kidnapping, and Sharif is charged also with inflicting the fatal injuries.

As in 2021, they will not attend the trial. “They are absolutely untraceable,” the defence lawyer Tranquillino Sarno, appointed by the court to represent Kamel, said last week.

Because of this, he said, even if they were convicted, they would “certainly not serve their sentences”.

Investigators believe Regeni was abducted and killed after being mistaken for a foreign spy. As part of his doctoral work, Regeni had been researching Egyptian trade unions, a particularly sensitive political issue.

His mother said her son’s body had been so badly mutilated that she recognised him only by the “tip of his nose”. Five of his teeth had been broken, 15 of his bones had been fractured and letters had been inscribed into his flesh, according to the family’s lawyer.

An Italian parliamentary commission found in December 2021 – weeks after the first trial was thrown out – that Egypt’s security agency was to blame for Regeni’s death.

It accused Egypt’s judiciary of acting in an “obstructive and openly hostile manner” by failing to disclose the whereabouts of the defendants.

In December 2020, all four suspects as well as a fifth were cleared of responsibility for Regeni’s murder by Egypt’s public prosecutor, who said he would drop the case.