Rome court convicts three Egyptian officials over killing of researcher Giulio Regeni

A Rome court on Monday convicted three Egyptian security officials of kidnapping the Italian researcher Giulio Regeni, a decade-defining case that tested relations between Rome and Cairo, while acquitting a fourth defendant of the murder charge prosecutors had built the trial around. The verdict, delivered by the First Court of Assizes, closes the first phase of a prosecution that Italy pursued for nearly ten years without the cooperation of the government whose officers stood accused.

Regeni, a 28-year-old doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, disappeared from a Cairo metro station on January 25, 2016, while researching Egypt's independent trade unions. His body was found nine days later in a ditch off the Cairo-Alexandria highway, bearing what Italian pathologists described as extensive and prolonged torture. No Egyptian official has ever stood trial in person for his death, and Monday's ruling, reached entirely in absentia, is the closest Italy's justice system has come to assigning individual responsibility.

The sentences

Police Colonel Hisham Helmi, Colonel Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim and Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif were each sentenced to 10 years in prison for aggravated kidnapping. A fourth defendant, Major General Tariq Sabir, the former head of Egypt's state security service, was acquitted outright. None of the four has ever appeared before the court, and all remain in Egypt, which has consistently declined to hand them over or formally notify them of the charges.

The outcome fell well short of what prosecutors had requested. They had asked the court to sentence Sharif, an officer with Egypt's General Intelligence Service, to life in prison for aggravated murder, and to impose terms of 17 years and six months on the other three for aggravated kidnapping resulting in death. Prosecutor Sergio Colaiocco told the court during closing arguments that Regeni had been subjected to "cold, methodical, organized violence" against a defenseless man. In the end, the panel convicted the three officers of abduction alone, declining to attribute the killing itself to any of the defendants and clearing Sabir of any role.

A decade of stalled justice

The case has shadowed Italian-Egyptian relations since the day Regeni's body was identified. Italy briefly recalled its ambassador to Cairo in 2016 after joint investigative sessions produced no answers, restoring full relations only the following year. Italian prosecutors spent years trying to obtain phone records, surveillance footage and witness testimony from Egyptian authorities, which they say was never meaningfully provided. The trial itself only became possible after Italy's Constitutional Court cleared the way for defendants to be tried in absentia when a foreign state refuses to notify them directly, a ruling that Egypt's government protested as a violation of its officers' rights.

Cairo has maintained throughout that its security services played no role in Regeni's death. Egypt's public prosecution has previously said there was insufficient evidence to support the Italian charges, and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs has repeatedly rejected accusations that state agents were involved, pointing instead to competing theories floated by Egyptian investigators over the years, including a since-discredited claim that Regeni was killed by a criminal gang. Rome's Foreign Ministry has said such Egyptian accounts were unacceptable and has pressed for full disclosure through diplomatic channels ever since.

The trial itself has had a tortured path to Monday's verdict. Italian prosecutors formally indicted the four officers in 2021, after a years-long investigation they said produced "unequivocal" evidence of the men's roles, only for proceedings to be suspended within months over whether defendants who had never been formally notified, and whom Egypt refused to produce, could lawfully be tried at all in their absence. Hearings resumed intermittently in the years that followed, with witnesses continuing to testify about the days Regeni spent in custody as recently as late 2024. Closing arguments concluded this summer, when prosecutors laid out their sentencing requests and the court set September 28 as the date for a verdict, after hearing from court-appointed defense lawyers who have never had contact with the men they represented.

Who this affects

The immediate parties are the four convicted and acquitted officers, who face no realistic prospect of serving time so long as they remain in Egypt, and Regeni's family, who have attended hearings throughout the decade-long pursuit of accountability. His parents, Paola Deffendi and Claudio Regeni, and his sister Irene were in the Rome courtroom for the reading of the verdict. During earlier testimony, Deffendi told the court she had been able to identify her son's body only "from the tip of his nose," so severe was the damage inflicted before his death.

The case has also become a reference point for foreign researchers, journalists and students working in authoritarian settings, and for the broader accountability of Egyptian security services. Rights groups, including Amnesty International, have long argued that Regeni's case reflects a wider pattern of enforced disappearance and torture in Egypt, where hundreds of people are reported to vanish into state custody each year without formal charge.

Reaction

Rome's chief prosecutor, Francesco Lo Voi, framed the verdict as vindication of a prosecution that had faced years of procedural obstacles and diplomatic friction.

"We are satisfied for having brought the case out of the quagmire into which it had risked sinking," Lo Voi said, adding that the result had been achieved despite "a lack of meaningful cooperation" from Egyptian authorities.

The verdict also lands against a backdrop of sustained European pressure on Cairo over the case. The European Parliament passed a resolution in 2016 condemning Regeni's torture and killing and calling on Egypt to cooperate fully with the Italian investigation, a demand it has repeated in various forms in the years since as the case dragged through pre-trial hearings and jurisdictional disputes. Egyptian officials have periodically accused European institutions and rights organizations of bias, insisting the country has cooperated in good faith with what it describes as a joint investigation.

What happens next

Italian prosecutors are widely expected to appeal the acquittal of Sabir and the failure to secure murder convictions, a process that could extend the case for several more years within Italy's court system. Because all four men remain outside Italian jurisdiction and Egypt has shown no willingness to extradite convicted nationals, the practical effect of Monday's sentences is likely to remain symbolic rather than punitive, at least in the near term.

The ruling is unlikely to resolve the underlying diplomatic strain between the two governments, which continue to cooperate closely on migration, energy and counterterrorism even as the Regeni case remains unsettled. For the family and their legal team, the verdict represents a rare judicial acknowledgment of state involvement in Regeni's disappearance, even if it falls short of the murder conviction they sought. Ten years after his death, the case stands as one of the few instances in which a European justice system has pursued criminal charges against foreign state security officers for the killing of one of its citizens abroad, a precedent that human rights lawyers say could shape how other European countries approach similar cases involving researchers and journalists who disappear in custody overseas.