A court in Rome set a new date for the trial of four high-ranking Egyptian security officials in the case of kidnapping, torturing and killing an Italian doctoral student in Cairo in 2016.
The trial on charges of kidnapping, torture and murder will begin in a Rome court on February 20, lawyers and parents of Giulio Regeni, whose mutilated body was found on a highway in Egypt, said.
This development came in the wake of a ruling by the Italian Constitutional Court last September that ruled that the defendants could be tried even though they had not received official notification because the Egyptian authorities refused to provide their addresses.
Regeni’s parents spent years seeking justice for the killing of their 28-year-old son.
“It’s a good day,” Regeni’s mother, Paola Defendi, told reporters after leaving the courtroom after the trial date was set.
Claudio Regeni, the father of the murdered student, said, “The pain still grips me.”
Regeni was conducting his doctoral research on street vendor trade unions in Cairo when he was kidnapped, shortly after he was spotted near a metro station in the Egyptian capital. After his body was found, the Egyptian authorities claimed that a gang of thieves killed the Cambridge University student.
In 2022, Italy’s Supreme Criminal Court rejected prosecutors’ efforts to revive the trial of the Egyptian defendants after the Cairo Court of First Instance decided that the trial could not proceed because the defendants had not been officially informed of an order requiring them to stand trial.
This issue caused tension in relations between Italy and Egypt, allies in efforts to combat international terrorism.
At one stage of the case, Italy withdrew its ambassador to pressure Egypt to cooperate in the investigation. Ultimately, Italian prosecutors issued indictments for the four Egyptians, who will likely be tried in absentia.
Regeni’s mother said that her son’s body was so severely disfigured due to torture that she only recognized him by the tip of his nose when she saw him. Human rights activists said that the marks on his body resemble those resulting from widespread torture in Egyptian security services facilities.
The officials charged by Italian prosecutors are Police Major Sherif Magdy; Major General Tariq Saber, who was a senior official in the National Security Service at the time of Regeni’s kidnapping; Colonel Hisham Helmy, who was serving in a security center as a police official in the Cairo area where the Italian student lived, and Colonel Aser Kamal, a police department commander responsible for street security and discipline operations.
2023-12-04 23:08:49
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