Regeni: murder charge dropped; three Egyptian secret service agents convicted. One acquitted
The operative part of the judgement handed down by the Court of Assizes in Rome. Colonels Uhsam Helmi and Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim and Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif (for whom a life sentence had been sought) were each sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, whilst General Tariq Sabir was acquitted
Key points
Ten years. This is the sentence handed down to the three Egyptian intelligence officers charged in the trial over the death of Giulio Regeni: Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif – for whom the prosecution had sought a life sentence – and Colonels Uhsam Helmi and Athar Kamel Mohamed. The fourth defendant, General Tariq Sabir, was acquitted. The Rome Assize Court dismissed the murder charge against General A. The three convicted defendants were found guilty of the charge of unlawful detention.
Ten years of misdirection
From promises of full cooperation to attempts to mislead the investigation, including unanswered requests for information and documents that were never handed over. More than ten years after Giulio Regeni’s murder, the investigation by the Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office reveals a systematic campaign by the Egyptian authorities to obstruct the search for the truth. From the very outset of the investigation, Italian investigators had identified as a priority the need to reconstruct the facts, identify those responsible for the torture and murder of the researcher from Friuli, and bring them to justice. However, the findings of the investigation have painted a very different picture, characterised by judicial cooperation deemed to be merely superficial and aimed, according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, more at concealing the truth than at uncovering it.
The Italian investigators sent to Cairo in 2016 operated without any real powers of initiative. Their role was limited to that of observers, with no ability to direct the investigative activities or play a substantive part in the decisions taken by the local authorities. Growing signs of mistrust led Ros and Sco to bring the joint investigation to a close on 23 March 2016.
The following day, the National Security Agency announced that it had identified and killed those responsible for Regeni’s abduction, torture and murder. According to the Egyptian account, the researcher had been the victim of a criminal gang comprising five individuals who specialised in robberies and fraud targeting foreigners. This account raised serious doubts within the Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office and was subsequently disproved by further investigative enquiries. Among the pieces of evidence deemed decisive was the location of a mobile phone number attributed to the alleged gang leader, which was found to have been active on the evening of 25 January 2016, approximately one hundred kilometres from Cairo. Investigators now describe that criminal group as the main diversionary tactic deployed to divert attention away from the Egyptian security services.
Over the following two years, cooperation between the two countries took the form of a long series of formal meetings that yielded no concrete investigative results. In December 2017, the Public Prosecutor’s Office handed over a report to the Egyptian authorities which already outlined the responsibilities of members of the National Security Agency who were subsequently charged in the trial. That initiative, too, came to nothing and, on 4 December 2018, the Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office entered five members of the Egyptian security services in the register of suspects.
