Rome court sentences three Egyptian officers to 10 years over murder of Cambridge student Giulio Regeni

Three former Egyptian security officials have been convicted by a court in Rome of kidnapping an Italian doctoral student whose mutilated body was found in a ditch outside Cairo a decade ago, delivering a rare judicial verdict in a case that strained relations between Rome and Cairo for years.

The ruling was handed down on Monday by judges in the Italian capital, who sentenced each of the three men to 10 years in prison on charges of aggravated kidnapping. All of the defendants were tried in absentia — they were neither present in court nor represented — and each has denied the charges. A fourth Egyptian defendant, General Tariq Sabir, was acquitted.

The case concerns Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian national who was enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge when he travelled to Egypt in January 2016 to carry out fieldwork for his PhD. His research focused on independent trade unions in the country, a subject the BBC article notes was politically controversial in Egypt at the time. Regeni was abducted on 25 January 2016, and his body was recovered days later from a ditch near the Egyptian capital. An autopsy carried out after his death found evidence that he had been tortured.

Prosecutors in Rome said Regeni sustained injuries consistent with being beaten with "kicks, fists, sticks and clubs", and that he died from a broken neck. His mother, Paola Regeni, told the Italian parliament in 2018 that her son's body was so disfigured she was able to identify him only by the tip of his nose. Images of the young man — smiling at the camera in a pink collared shirt and green jumper — became the enduring symbol of a decade-long campaign by his parents, Claudio and Paola, and his sister Irene for an official account of what happened to him.

Investigators in Italy and Egypt initially worked together on the disappearance, but the two sides reached diametrically opposed conclusions. Egyptian authorities blamed criminal gangsters and advanced a series of alternative explanations for the death, among them a car accident, a failed drug deal and a botched robbery. Cairo also denied that the state was involved in Regeni's disappearance or death in any way. Prosecutors in Rome, by contrast, concluded that the Egyptian national security agency was implicated in the crime — a conclusion that has long been resisted by the Egyptian government.

The four men put on trial in Rome were General Tariq Sabir, Colonel Usham Helmi, Colonel Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim and Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif. With Sabir acquitted, the convictions against Helmi, Mohamed Ibrahim and Abdelal Sharif represent the first time that members of the Egyptian security establishment have been found criminally liable by a foreign court in the Regeni affair.

The verdict drew a response from Rome's chief prosecutor and from the lawyer representing the Regeni family, both of whom welcomed the judgment. Alessandra Ballerini, the family's lawyer, said: "From today, people around the world can feel safer. Impunity can be defeated and democracies can place limits on arbitrary power." Her remarks framed the case as being about more than one man's murder, positioning it as a test of whether governments that operate outside the law can be held to account by the courts of another country.

Reaction in the courtroom itself was subdued. As the ruling was read out, family members and supporters fell silent, according to the AFP reporting cited in the article. Many of those in attendance wore yellow T-shirts and badges, the colour long associated with the Regeni family's campaign for justice. Photographs from the court show Claudio and Paola Regeni holding the hand of their daughter Irene as they watched the proceedings, their body language conveying the strain of a decade spent seeking answers.

The convictions are the culmination of a long and difficult legal effort. The trial had originally been scheduled to take place in 2021 but was suspended after concerns arose that prosecutors had been unable to locate the defendants in order to serve formal charges on them — one of several procedural obstacles that delayed the case. That blockage was lifted in September 2023, when Italy's Constitutional Court ruled that the trial could proceed. Monday's verdict closes a chapter that opened with Regeni's disappearance in Cairo more than ten years ago.

Practical consequences for the convicted men remain limited. Extradition from Egypt is considered unlikely, and the three officers are understood to have not attended court in Rome. Italy's prosecutors nevertheless described the ruling as the end of their years-long effort to hold the officials accountable, suggesting its significance is largely symbolic and precedential rather than punitive in immediate terms.

The verdict could nonetheless reopen diplomatic friction between the two countries. Convictions of serving or former security personnel carry greater sensitivity than rulings against ordinary suspects, and previous exchanges between Rome and Cairo have included Italian allegations that Egypt attempted to cover up the killing. Analysts of the case have long treated the Regeni affair as a test of whether Italy — a major Mediterranean partner and a significant donor to Egyptian programmes — would tolerate pressure on its own officials over a case of this kind.

For the Regeni family, the significance of Monday's ruling is best measured against the campaign they have run since 2016. Supporters have marked each anniversary of the abduction, including at a plaque unveiled in Cambridgeshire for the eighth anniversary of his death in January 2024. The courtroom silence that accompanied the verdict suggested that, for those who spent a decade pressing courts, police and governments for the truth, the words of the judgment carried a weight that a sentence delivered in absentia could not fully match.