Judges in Rome retire to deliberate in Giulio Regeni case — ANSA English

Judges at a court in Rome, Italy, have retired to deliberate on a verdict in the case of four officers of the Egyptian National Security Service. They are on trial over the abduction and torture that led to the death of Italian student Giulio Regeni in Cairo in 2016. The verdict is expected to be announced at around 18:00 Italian time, ANSA English reports.

Case circumstances

Regeni was 28 years old. He was a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge and was researching Cairo's street vendors' trade unions. The student disappeared in the Cairo metro on January 25, 2016. Nine days later, on February 3, his half-naked body was found in a ditch along the Cairo–Alexandria highway.

ANSA English reports that Regeni was likely abducted and tortured to death by National Security Service General Tarek Sabir, Colonels Atar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim and Usham Helmi, as well as Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif. Prosecutors asked for Sharif to receive life imprisonment for aggravated murder and for the other three defendants to receive 17 and a half years in prison each for aggravated abduction.

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Trial without the defendants

None of the four defendants was present at the hearings because Egypt refused to notify them of the proceedings. The case was suspended for two years until Italy's Constitutional Court ruled in 2023 that the trial could continue despite the lack of formal notification to the defendants.

Alessandra Ballerini, the lawyer for Regeni's parents, said that the path to a verdict had been extremely difficult. She thanked the media and supporters of the “Truth for Giulio Regeni” campaign, whose symbol is the color yellow. According to her, few people expected the case to reach trial and a verdict.