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

Three former Egyptian security officials have been convicted of aggravated kidnapping over the disappearance and death of Giulio Regeni, an Italian doctoral student at the University of Cambridge whose mutilated body was pulled from a ditch near Cairo a decade ago. The verdict, delivered on Monday at a court in Rome, ends a ten-year campaign by Regeni's family and Italian prosecutors to establish official responsibility for his killing.

The three men were tried in absentia — they were neither present in court nor represented by lawyers — and have denied the charges throughout. Each was sentenced to 10 years in prison. A fourth Egyptian defendant, General Tariq Sabir, was acquitted, leaving three of the four security figures facing prison terms.

Regeni, who was 28, vanished in January 2016 while carrying out fieldwork for his PhD. His body was discovered days later in a ditch on the outskirts of Cairo, badly mutilated. An autopsy carried out after his return to Italy found evidence that he had been tortured.

Prosecutors told the court that Regeni suffered blows from "kicks, fists, sticks and clubs", and that he died from a broken neck. In 2018, his mother told the Italian parliament that her son's body was so disfigured she was able to identify him only by the tip of his nose. The image of the case has haunted Italy ever since, and became a shorthand for diplomatic deadlock between Rome and Cairo.

His research focused on Egypt's independent trade unions — a politically sensitive subject in a country where organised labour activism has long been met with state suspicion. Regeni was abducted on 25 January 2016, and his academic work was later cited by Italian prosecutors as evidence that his disappearance was connected to his field of enquiry rather than to any ordinary crime.

The investigation was unusual in that Italian and Egyptian prosecutors initially worked side by side. Their conclusions, however, diverged sharply. Egyptian authorities blamed criminal gangsters, and floated a series of alternative explanations for the death, including a car accident, a failed drug deal and a botched robbery. Cairo consistently denied any state involvement in Regeni's disappearance or death.

Rome's prosecutors reached a different conclusion. They argued that agents of the Egyptian national security agency were involved in the crime — the central claim on which the convictions rest. The four men charged were General Tariq Sabir, Colonel Usham Helmi, Colonel Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim and Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif. Sabir was cleared by the court.

Reaction in the courtroom was subdued rather than celebratory. As the verdict was read out, family members and supporters fell silent. Many wore yellow T-shirts and badges, the colour adopted by the campaign for justice over Regeni's killing, according to AFP. Photographers captured the moment as his parents, Claudio and Paola Regeni, sat with their daughter Irene and watched the ruling unfold.

Alessandra Ballerini, a lawyer for the Regeni family, welcomed the judgment, saying that people around the world could now feel safer. Her remarks, reported after the verdict, were directed at the broader principle rather than the three defendants alone: impunity, she said, can be defeated, and democracies can place limits on arbitrary power. Rome's chief prosecutor also endorsed the ruling.

The legal path to Monday's verdict was long and difficult. The trial had originally been scheduled for 2021, but was suspended after it emerged that prosecutors had been unable to track down the defendants in order to serve formal charges on them. The standoff was eventually broken in September 2023, when Italy's Constitutional Court ruled that the trial could proceed despite the absence of those accused.

That procedural history helps explain why the defendants were tried in absentia rather than in person. Because the men are believed to be in Egypt, and Cairo has shown no indication of willingness to surrender them, extradition remains unlikely. The sentences are therefore likely to stand as symbolic and legal findings rather than as the basis for any immediate transfer of prisoners to Italian custody.

Even so, the ruling carries diplomatic weight. Italy and Egypt have long traded accusations over the case, and previous efforts to hold Egyptian officials accountable were met with official denials. Convictions of serving or former security personnel — even in absentia — reopen questions about Cairo's cooperation with Italian investigators and could add fresh strain to the two countries' relations.

The ruling also lands in a place close to home for the Regeni family. A plaque marking the eighth anniversary of his death was installed in Cambridgeshire in January 2024, and his case has remained a fixture of British news coverage since his body was identified. The verdict, delivered more than a decade after he disappeared, is the first time a court has found that Egyptian state agents bore criminal responsibility.

Campaigners and supporters say the significance of the case extends beyond one family. Regeni's research on trade unions placed him near one of the most sensitive corners of Egyptian political life, and his prosecution in absentia has been criticised by human rights organisations as a substitute for accountability. The three convictions, and the acquittal of a fourth defendant, leave the case partially — but not entirely — resolved.

With General Sabir cleared and the other three men serving sentences they are unlikely to serve, attention now turns to whether Rome will press for extradition and whether Cairo's response will further cool relations. After a decade of silence from the Egyptian state, the verdict at least establishes in law what Italian prosecutors had argued for years: that the disappearance and death of Giulio Regeni was not an accident, a robbery or a drug deal gone wrong, but a killing for which Egyptian security officials were responsible.