Court of Assizes of Rome condemns three Egyptian agents for the kidnapping, torture and murder of Giulio Regeni

Giulio Regeni was "kidnapped, tortured and killed" by Egyptian National Security officials in the exercise of their duties. They mistook him for an English spy. He paid with his life for research into independent trade unions, unpopular with the Egyptian apparatus. Now the Court of Assizes of Rome establishes this truth in a sentence of conviction for three of the four agents of the Cairo secret service.

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From promises of full collaboration to misdirections, through investigative requests that remained unanswered and documents that were never delivered. More than ten years after the murder of Giulio Regeni, the investigation by the Rome Prosecutor's Office reveals a systematic activity of obstructing the ascertainment of the truth by the Egyptian authorities. From the early stages of the investigation, the Italian investigators had indicated that it was a priority to reconstruct the facts, identify those responsible for the torture and murder of the Friulian researcher and bring them to justice. The investigative findings, however, have returned an opposite picture, characterized by judicial collaboration considered only apparent and aimed, according to the Prosecutor's Office, more at concealing the truth than at ascertaining it.

The Italian investigators sent to Cairo in 2016 operated without real powers of initiative. Their presence was limited to that of observers, without the possibility of directing investigative activities or concretely participating in the decisions taken by the local apparatus. The growing manifestations of mistrust led Ros and Sco to end the joint investigative experience on 23 March 2016.

The following day National Security announced that it had identified and killed those responsible for Regeni's kidnapping, torture and murder. According to the Egyptian version, the researcher was the victim of a criminal gang made up of five people dedicated to robberies and scams against foreigners. A reconstruction that aroused strong doubts in the Rome Prosecutor's Office and which subsequent investigative checks would have disproved. Among the elements considered decisive, the location of a telephone number attributed to the alleged leader of the gang, which was found to be active on the evening of January 25, 2016, approximately one hundred kilometers from Cairo. That criminal group is now indicated by investigators as the main red herring put in place to draw attention away from the Egyptian security apparatus.

Over the next two years, cooperation between the two countries resulted in a long series of formal meetings without concrete investigative results. In December 2017, the Prosecutor's Office provided the Egyptian authorities with information that already outlined the responsibilities of members of National Security who were later accused in the trial. That initiative also remained without effect and, on 4 December 2018, the Capitoline Prosecutor's Office registered five members of the Egyptian security services in the register of suspects.