Italian MNE distinguishes condemnation of Egyptian officers and relationship with country

Dafter, on Monday, a court of Rome handed over the sentence of a long judicial process, marked by the lack of cooperation of the Egyptian authorities, which forced the trial to take place in absentia, without the presence of the defendants, Tajani triggered a controversy in Italy by commenting that three individuals had been convicted, not the State of Egypt.

“ I'm surprised by the controversy. I just took a summary of yesterday’s decision [Monday]”, said Antonio Tajani today, who is also Deputy Prime Minister in the ultra-conservative Government led by Giorgia Meloni.

The chief of diplomacy argued that his goal is to “avoid a break in relations with Egypt” following the judicial decision and urged him to “wait for the next stages of the process,” ensuring that Rome never stopped pressing the Egyptian authorities to get to the truth, but through a “diplomatic action, which is more valuable than public indignation.”.

For the Italian opposition, these statements run the risk of minimizing the political importance of the verdict and artificially separating the conduct of the defendants from the role they played, since they were not ordinary citizens, but members of the Cairo security apparatus.

On Monday, three secret service agents from Egypt were sentenced, in absentia, by a court in Rome to 10 years in prison, each for the kidnapping and torture until the death of an Italian student, Giulio Regeni, in 2016.

In a sentence handed down more than 10 years after Regeni’s death, which shocked Italy, the court of Rome sentenced three of the four defendants tried in absentia – since Egypt had never cooperated with the judicial process, refusing to notify the officers – after concluding that they kidnapped and tortured the Italian citizen, a PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge, a native of Venice (north), who studied the Cairo street unions.

The court condemned Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif, for whom the prosecution had sought life imprisonment, and Colonels Uhsam Helmi and Athar Kamel Mohamed, for whom the Public Prosecutor sought sentences of 17 and a half years in prison, having acquitted the fourth defendant, General Tariq Sabir.

Giulio Regeni's 28-year-old body was found half-naked in a ditch on the highway connecting Cairo to Alexandria on February 3, 2016, nine days after it disappeared while circulating on the Egyptian capital subway.

The young man will have been kidnapped and tortured for days by the agents of the security services now convicted, on suspicion of being a spy, having his mother stated that Giulio Regeni was so brutalized that he only recognized him “by the nose”, commenting that “all the evil of the world” had fallen on his son’s body, a phrase that would give the title to a documentary produced this year.

This trial had been suspended for two years until the Constitutional Court decided in 2023 that it could proceed, although the defendants had not been formally notified of the charges.

“Few would have bet that we would reach a trial and then a verdict. The Egyptian regime did everything in its power to prevent this trial, but this family is resilient,” said lawyer Alessandra Ballerini, who represented Regeni’s parents.