Italian court unblocks trial of Egyptian security personnel charged with Regeni murder

Italy came a step closer on Wednesday to pressing charges against the four Egyptian security officials thought to have tortured and killed Italian researcher Giulio Regeni in 2016. 

Though the defendants have not been formally informed of the charges as Cairo has refused to cooperate with their prosecution, the Constitutional Court in Rome decided to allow the trial of the four Egyptian nationals to proceed in absentia on Wednesday, seven years after the investigation began.

Regeni was a postgraduate candidate at Cambridge University conducting research on independent trade unions in Egypt. He was forcibly disappeared on January 25, 2016, to be held incommunicado and tortured in security facilities, according to published evidence from the investigations. Regeni was ultimately killed and his body was finally found dumped by a Cairo roadside on February 3.

Rome’s Court of Cassation decided in July 2022 to suspend the trial, which started in May 2021 without a resolution, on the basis that it was not clear whether official notification of the charges had reached the four accused, a requirement in Italian law. 

This lack of clarity, which brought over six years of investigations to a halt, came due to the Egyptian government putting an end to a joint investigation with Italian authorities in late 2020.

Two of the accused were members of Egypt’s National Security Agency and two of whom were employed by the police force at the time of Regeni’s killing, reports said. They are: Major General Tarek Saber, a senior NSA official at the time of Regeni’s murder who retired in 2017; Major Sherif Magdy, who also served at the NSA, where he was in charge of the team that placed Regeni under surveillance; Colonel Hesham Helmy, who served at a security center in charge of policing the Cairo district where Regeni lived; and Colonel Asser Kamal, the head of a local policing unit.

Of the four officials, Major Magdy Sharif is directly accused of torturing Regeni and causing “injuries that would have prevented him from carrying out normal bodily functions for over 40 days and involving the permanent damage and loss of several organs.”

Sharif also stands accused of the murder “through violent contusive action, exerted on various cranial-cervical-dorsal areas… that caused massive traumatic injuries to Giulio Regeni, resulting in acute respiratory failure and leading to his death.”