Three Egyptian security officials were found guilty in absentia by an Italian court on Monday of kidnapping Giulio Regeni, an Italian doctoral student whose brutalized body was found on the outskirts of Cairo in 2016.
The three officials — Maj. Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif, Col. Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim and Col. Uhsam Helmi — were each sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay damages to Mr. Regeni’s family as well as court fees.
Major Sharif, the only official charged with killing Mr. Regeni, was acquitted of his murder. A fourth official, Gen. Tariq Sabir, was acquitted on all charges.
The Egyptian government declined to comment, but Egyptian prosecutors have previously said the case was brought “without solid evidence.” The convicted officials, who are not in Italy and whose locations are unknown, could not be reached.
A lawyer for Mr. Regeni’s family, Alessandra Ballerini, said the sentence meant that “all citizens of the world can feel safer.” In a statement, Ms. Ballerini added that the sentence would force authoritarian regimes “to remember that people’s dignity is inviolable.”
The verdict follows a tortuous, decade-long legal drama that dominated Italian discourse, heightened scrutiny of Egypt’s authoritarian government and strained relations between Cairo and Rome. Yellow banners with the slogan “Truth for Giulio Regeni” have been a common sight across Italy.
Mr. Regeni, a graduate student at Cambridge University, was studying informal labor movements in Cairo when he disappeared on Jan. 25, 2016, as security officials flooded Cairo to head off demonstrations marking the fifth anniversary of protests that drove President Hosni Mubarak from office in 2011.
The body of Mr. Regeni, 28, was found nine days later on the outskirts of the city, bearing signs of severe torture.
An Italian autopsy carried out in Rome showed that Mr. Regeni had been beaten, burned, stabbed and probably flogged on the soles of his feet over a period of four days. He died when his neck was snapped.
The case quickly became a diplomatic crisis as Egypt denied responsibility, saying that Mr. Regeni might have been killed by a criminal gang that preyed on foreigners.
But the nature of the injuries — which many Egyptians compared with countless cases of detainee abuse by the security services — led Italian officials to conclude that the Egyptian security forces were involved.
The New York Times reported in 2017 that in the weeks after Mr. Regeni’s death, the United States acquired proof that Egyptian security officials had abducted, tortured and killed him. Yet Italian investigators who traveled to Cairo to assist the Egyptian investigation were hindered at every turn, The Times reported.
Rome’s chief prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi expressed satisfaction with the outcome despite “not especially fruitful cooperation” from Egyptian authorities.
Defense lawyers said Egyptian officials had been mostly helpful. Egypt “consistently provided all the necessary documentation,” said Paola Armellin, a lawyer who defended General Sabir.
Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse on Monday, Ms. Ballerini described the struggle to bring the case to trial as an “uphill obstacle course.”
But the case also raised issues about defendants’ rights. The four Egyptians were never formally notified of the charges and never appeared in court, an anomaly that their lawyers said perverted the course of the trial.
“It was a miscarriage of justice,” said Anna Lisa Ticconi, a lawyer for Major Sharif who said she had never spoken to her client.
Legal proceedings formally began in December 2018, when Rome prosecutors identified several Egyptians — whom they said were members of Egypt’s National Security Agency — as possible suspects.
Defense lawyers assigned by the Italian state argued the case could not go to trial as their clients had never been formally advised of the charges against them.
A judge said that given the attention the case had received in the Italian and international media, it was impossible for the defendants to be unaware of the legal proceedings against them. But the case was suspended.
The case bounced between courts until Italy’s Constitutional Court said in 2023 that the case could proceed even without the defendants, who were tried in absentia.
Prosecutors in Egypt said that they “did not support” the Italian decision to pursue charges, which they said were made “without solid evidence.”
The trial began in February 2024 and depended on evidence gathered in Cairo by the Italian police, as well as analyses of video and cellphone usage in the area where Mr. Regeni was seized, at the time that he disappeared.
Defense lawyers complained on Monday that the trial that their clients had not had their say in court, and witnesses on their behalf could not be called. They also raised issues of jurisdiction and challenged some of the charges. “There has been a serious violation of the right to a defense. Unfortunately, this trial attracted a lot of media attention, and so the proceedings moved forward when they shouldn’t have,” Ms. Armellin said.
Given the exceptional circumstances of being tried in absentia, appealing the sentence could be a challenge, as the defendants have to make the request, said Ms. Armellin.
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