On Monday, 3,890 days will have passed since Giulio Regeni was found dead in Egypt, with evident signs of violence and torture on his body. The first procedural "truth" regarding that death will arrive on Monday with the sentence of the first Court of Assizes of Rome called to decide on the request made by the prosecutor's office against the four defendants, all belonging to the Cairo secret services.
For them the deputy Sergio Colaiocco, on 23 June, asked for a life sentence and three sentences of 17 and a half years in prison for what happened between January and February 2016. In particular, life imprisonment was requested for Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif - believed to be the man who physically killed Regeni - and other sentences for Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim, Uhsam Helmi and Tareq Sabyr.
"This trial does not deliver an intuitive or emotional truth - the representative of the prosecution stated in the courtroom -. It delivers a procedural truth constructed through documentary evidence; declarative evidence; technical-scientific evidence; external feedback; independent convergences; trial verifications".
A process obstinately wanted by the prosecutors of Piazzale Clodio against "the silence and lies" of Egypt which "decided to cover up and protect the torturers" by providing convenient versions or "outright fakes" and covering up evidence. For the prosecutors in Piazzale Clodio "what is being judged here is not the simple suppression of a human life. What is being judged here is the methodical, cold, organized exercise of violence on a defenseless man. What is being judged here is the kidnapping of a person removed from any guarantee".
In the courtroom, as always, Giulio's parents will be present who from the first day have asked for "truth and justice" for the Friulian researcher. "The Regeni family fought with their bare hands against the regime, but they never lost a shred of dignity," said their lawyer, Alessandra Ballerini, during the trial.
"The Regeni family has never allowed itself to be contaminated by hatred. They have never sought revenge or punishment, they only said 'truth and justice'", added Ballerini, recalling the path faced by the researcher's family, marked by institutional meetings and constant obstacles. "Since Giulio disappeared, the family has not been spared any torment. We have had to meet government officials, even Egyptian representatives, they have not been spared anything. We have suffered persecution and threats."
Giulio's ordeal began on January 25th ten years ago. "That day - explained the Prosecutor's Office - the Italian researcher enters, unaware, a gray area in which law ceases to exist and only naked force takes its place. From that moment Giulio is no longer a person - say the investigators -. He becomes a seized body.
He becomes a subject to bend, he becomes a recipient of violence." According to the accusation, Regeni was deprived "not only of freedom and life" but was "deprived of his very condition as a human being with rights. He was placed in a space in which law, control, defense and limits no longer existed. A space in which power had taken the form of pure arbitrariness".
It wasn't common criminals who did it all, it wasn't men from the underworld. They were men of the state, belonging to the security apparatus. These are "public officials of the highest rank, subjects fully aware of their institutional duties, first of all that of guaranteeing legality and not bending it to illicit purposes".
As regards the motive for such violence, the Prosecutor's Office speaks of "a mistaken perception of hostile intelligence activity" but Giulio - it was reiterated - "was not a spy", he was just a 27-year-old boy who tried to do his job as a researcher as best as possible.
