Regeni murder: Rome court convicts three Egyptian agents

Rome's Court of Assizes has issued its verdict in the trial over the kidnapping, torture and killing of Giulio Regeni, the Cambridge University doctoral student who died in Cairo between January and February 2016. The trial was held in absentia, more than ten years after the events: the four defendants, all members of the Egyptian intelligence services, never appeared before the Italian judges throughout the years of investigation and hearings.

Three of the defendants were sentenced to ten years in prison each: Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif and Colonels Uhsam Helmi and Athar Kamel Mohamed. For all three, the judges dropped the murder charge and instead convicted them of kidnapping and torture. The fourth defendant, General Tariq Sabir, was acquitted of all charges against him.

The sentences handed down are considerably lighter than those requested by the prosecution, which had sought a life sentence for Sharif, considered the direct perpetrator of Regeni's kidnapping and torture, and 17 years in prison for each of the other three defendants, including Sabir.

The case

Regeni, 28, a doctoral student at Cambridge University, had been abducted in Cairo on the fifth anniversary of the Tahrir Square protests. From that moment, nothing more was heard of the young researcher until his body was found a week later in a ditch beside a road near the Egyptian capital. His body bore visible signs of the torture he suffered before his death.

Regeni's family said they were satisfied with the Court of Assizes' verdict. Rome's chief prosecutor, Francesco Lo Voi, expressed the same view, stressing that Egyptian authorities had never cooperated with Italian justice throughout the years of investigation and trial that preceded the ruling.