Almost five years after the mutilated corpse of Giulio Regeni was found on the outskirts of Cairo in February 2016, Italian prosecutors have charged four members of Egypt’s national security agency over his kidnapping and murder.
For those working to uncover the truth about how Regeni died and why Egyptian security forces had entrapped the student in a web of surveillance, it was a day heavy with emotion.
“It was a long journey, beginning with the day they raided my house and took me to jail,” said Ahmed Abdallah, the head of the board of trustees of the Egyptian Commission for Rights (ECRF) and Freedoms, whose lawyers act as the Regeni family’s Egyptian counsel.
Abdallah was arrested on terrorism charges in 2016 and released later that year, part of a pattern of reprisals against the ECRF and its staff that included raiding its offices and further arrests.
“We are now seeing the beginning of justice,” he said. Italy is expected to put the four security officials on trial, probably in absentia, next year. All four are charged with kidnapping the doctoral student. One of the four, Maj Magdi Ibrahim Abdel al-Sharif, stands accused of grievous bodily harm.
The move to indict the four men and bring details of their alleged crimes into an open court follows years of Egyptian officials blaming others for Regeni’s disappearance and murder. The trial is expected to lay bare the practices of the Egyptian security apparatus, widely regarded as the backbone of a brutal police state.
In September this year the ECRF, which tracks enforced disappearances as part of its human rights work, reported that 2,723 people had been forcibly disappeared by Egyptian security forces since it began tracking the numbers in 2015. The disappearances are associated with torture, the “calling card of the security services,” according to Human Rights Watch.
“After the thousands of cases of enforced disappearances in Egypt, finally we can hold someone accountable,” said Abdallah.
In the weeks following Regeni’s murder, Egyptian officials offered their Italian counterparts a range of explanations, suggesting that Regeni had been part of an antiquities smuggling ring, that he was killed after attending a sex party, or that he was working with the Muslim Brotherhood, a political group regarded as enemies of the Egyptian state. There is no evidence to support any of these claims.
In March 2016, Egyptian security forces killed five men in a shootout, claiming they were “a gang” that had kidnapped the 28-year-old. It later said there were “doubts” that the group was responsible.
Meanwhile, Egyptian officials stonewalled Italy’s efforts to investigate Regeni’s death, obscuring key pieces of evidence. When Egyptian officials provided CCTV footage from the Cairo metro in 2018 following two years of demands by Italian prosecutors, the footage had unexplained gaps, rendering it useless.
Egypt’s public prosecution repeated the claim that a criminal gang was responsible for Regeni’s kidnapping when it suspended its own investigation in November this year. It said the identity of Regeni’s killer remained “unknown”. The statement also mentioned that any security officials accused would have acted alone, a claim likely to come under scrutiny in the forthcoming trial given the structure and extensive power of Egypt’s interior ministry.
The trial is likely to prove embarrassing for European leaders, including some in Italy, who have indulged the Egyptian president, Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, and his regime with weapons sales and state visits. This week the French president, Emmanuel Macron, quietly presented Sisi with the Légion d’honneur, the French state’s highest honour, during a visit by the Egyptian leader to Paris.
The trial will also provide a unique opportunity for holding Egypt’s powerful national security agency to account. Hussein Baoumi, of Amnesty International, said the indictments “send a strong message to everyone in the NSA and the security forces that they are not immune, even though they have acted for years under the assumption of complete impunity.”
Abdallah agreed. “This is a victory and window of hope for all of those who believe in justice,” he said. “Even if it is far away, it’s still achievable.”
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