Rome court jails three Egyptian security officers over murder of Cambridge student Giulio Regeni

Three former Egyptian security officials have been found guilty of the kidnapping 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, a Rome court ruled on Monday. Each of the men was handed a 10-year prison sentence for aggravated kidnapping, while a fourth defendant walked free.

The convicted men are Colonel Usham Helmi, Colonel Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim and Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif. All four went on trial in absentia, and the three sentenced have denied the charges against them throughout the proceedings. General Tariq Sabir, the fourth defendant, was acquitted.

Regeni, who was 28, vanished in January 2016 while carrying out fieldwork for his Cambridge PhD, a project on Egypt's independent trade unions — a subject regarded as politically sensitive in Cairo because of the country's history of cracking down on organised labour. He was abducted on 25 January 2016, and his badly mutilated body was discovered days later. An autopsy subsequently established that he had been tortured.

The circumstances of his death have divided investigators for years. Italian and Egyptian prosecutors began their work jointly but reached diametrically opposed conclusions. Egyptian authorities blamed criminal gangsters and advanced a series of alternative explanations for the death, among them a car accident, a failed drug deal and a botched robbery. Cairo also denied any state role in either Regeni's disappearance or his death.

Prosecutors in Rome took a different view. They concluded that officers of the Egyptian national security agency were involved in the crime — a finding that, if accepted, points not to street-level criminality but to a systematic state operation.

The trial itself was the product of a long legal struggle. It was originally scheduled for 2021 but was suspended after prosecutors said they had been unable to track down the defendants well enough to serve formal charges on them. The process only resumed in September 2023, when Italy's Constitutional Court ruled that the trial could proceed despite the outstanding procedural problems.

The verdict closes a chapter in what Italian authorities have described as a decade-long effort to bring those responsible to justice. Regeni's family has campaigned intensively for answers since his death, and the courtroom on Monday reflected the long wait: family members and supporters fell silent as the ruling was read out, many of them wearing yellow T-shirts and badges in the colour of the campaign, AFP reported. Photographs showed his parents, Claudio and Paola Regeni, and his sister Irene, watching from the court.

Outside the courtroom, reaction was one of relief mixed with caution. Alessandra Ballerini, a lawyer acting for the Regeni family, welcomed the ruling and framed it in wider political terms. "From today, people around the world can feel safer," she said, adding that impunity can be defeated and that democracies are able to place limits on arbitrary power.

Rome's chief prosecutor also welcomed the judgment, saying it vindicates the work of the Italian authorities who spent years pursuing the case across borders. The convictions deliver a judicial answer to a question Egypt has consistently refused to concede: that the disappearance and death of a foreign researcher was not the work of common criminals.

The physical evidence set out at trial has been among the most disturbing elements of the case. Regeni's mother told the Italian parliament in 2018 that her son's body was so disfigured she was able to identify him only by the tip of his nose. Prosecutors said he suffered injuries consistent with being beaten with "kicks, fists, sticks and clubs", and that he died from a broken neck — a combination of alleged abuse by several people that points to interrogation rather than a single violent encounter.

The ruling is significant out of proportion to the sentences handed down, precisely because of the practical limits on enforcing them. The three men were tried in absentia and remain at liberty; their convictions are unlikely to lead to extradition, and Cairo has shown no inclination to hand over former security personnel. Even so, the verdict establishes an official finding of state responsibility in a jurisdiction with the authority to make it, giving the Regeni family a legal document that carries weight their previous decade of campaigning could not.

Diplomatic consequences are also possible. Italy and Egypt have maintained close ties across the Mediterranean, and a legal finding that implicates the Egyptian national security agency in the killing of an Italian citizen on Egyptian soil is the kind of development that can sour relations, particularly as Rome presses for accountability. The convictions are expected to renew tensions between the two governments, adding a human-rights dispute to an already crowded bilateral agenda.

For Cambridge, the case has long shadowed the university's relationship with Egypt. Regeni's research into trade unions placed him squarely in territory the Egyptian state was determined to keep closed, and his death prompted vigils, commemorations and a plaque marking the anniversary of his killing in Cambridgeshire, where he had lived and studied.

Ten years on, the legal system has spoken. The question now is whether the sentences, delivered in absentia to men who deny all wrongdoing, can have any practical effect — or whether the Regeni family's decade-long campaign must continue in the absence of those who carried it out.