Rome court gives three Egyptian officers 10 years over Cambridge student Giulio Regeni's abduction

Three Egyptian security officials have been convicted in Rome 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, ending a case that had divided Rome and Cairo for years. The men, tried in absentia, were each sentenced on Monday to 10 years in prison for aggravated kidnapping. A fourth Egyptian defendant was cleared.

The ruling delivers the outcome Italian prosecutors had spent much of the last decade pursuing, and it installs in law the conclusion reached by prosecutors in Rome: that agents of the Egyptian national security agency were responsible for the crime. The three convicted men denied the charges. Gen Tariq Sabir, the fourth defendant named in the indictment, was acquitted.

Regeni, 28, disappeared in January 2016 while carrying out research in Egypt for his PhD at Cambridge, a project on the country's independent trade unions — a subject regarded as politically sensitive in Egypt. His body was found days later in a ditch near the capital. An autopsy conducted afterwards indicated he had been tortured, and Italian prosecutors later described injuries consistent with being beaten with "kicks, fists, sticks and clubs", and concluded that he died from a broken neck. His mother told the Italian parliament in 2018 that her son's body was so disfigured that she was able to identify him only by the tip of his nose.

The abduction, on 25 January 2016, was the point at which the two countries' investigations began to separate. Italian and Egyptian prosecutors initially worked together on the case but reached opposite conclusions. Cairo's authorities blamed criminal gangsters and offered a menu of alternative explanations for Regeni's death, among them a car accident, a failed drug deal and a botched robbery. They also rejected any suggestion of state involvement in his disappearance or death.

Rome's prosecutors took a different view, concluding that the Egyptian national security agency was involved. That divergence shaped everything that followed: the years of campaigning by Regeni's family, the years of pressure on Italy's judicial system to deliver a trial, and the diplomatic friction that has punctuated relations between the two countries.

The four men on trial were Gen Tariq Sabir, Col Usham Helmi, Col Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim and Maj Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif. Because the defendants were not in court, none of them heard the sentences read in their presence, and the possibility of their appearing in Italy remains remote — extradition is considered unlikely. The practical limits of the verdict were acknowledged in how the courtroom reacted: rather than celebration, there was silence as the ruling was delivered, according to AFP.

Regeni's family has pressed for justice throughout the decade since his death. They attended the verdict wearing yellow T-shirts and badges, the colour long associated with the campaign, and were accompanied by their daughter Irene. The family was represented by the lawyer Alessandra Ballerini, who said that after the ruling people around the world could feel safer. She argued the case showed impunity can be defeated and that democracies can place limits on arbitrary power — a framing that casts the convictions as a vindication of judicial independence rather than a purely bilateral dispute between two governments.

The sentence is the culmination of a long and difficult legal process, one repeatedly delayed by practical obstacles rather than by legal argument. The trial was originally scheduled for 2021 but was suspended because prosecutors were unable to locate the defendants well enough to serve charges on them. It was not until September 2023 that Italy's Constitutional Court ruled the trial could proceed. Monday's hearing, and the guilty verdicts that followed, were the first time a court of another country put the question of Egyptian state responsibility for Regeni's killing on the bench.

The verdict is likely to reopen a diplomatic channel that had been left only partly closed. Even with extradition improbable, convictions of serving security officials carry symbolic weight in Cairo, and Italian officials have long argued that Egypt attempted to obstruct the inquiry. Analysts of the case have noted that the practical enforcement of the ruling may be limited, but that its political and legal consequences are harder to contain.

The trial also closes a chapter for Cambridge, where the case has remained a point of reference since 2016. Regeni's research on Egyptian labour activism put him in direct contact with the kind of organising that the Egyptian state of the mid-2010s was suppressing, and his death became an international test of whether a European state could secure accountability for a foreign government's actions.

For the prosecution, the case was built on forensic and digital evidence assembled over years, and on the finding that the injuries inflicted on Regeni were not consistent with the accidents and robberies proposed by Egyptian authorities. Monday's ruling appears to have accepted that reconstruction of events, at least in the eyes of a court in Rome — a determination Egypt's own investigators never reached.

The reporting on Monday came from BBC correspondent Olivia Ireland, with further material from Reuters and AFP. Neither the Egyptian government nor the national security agency is quoted in the immediate reaction to the verdict, and it remains unclear whether Cairo will formally contest the ruling or respond to the convictions at all.