Rome Court Convicts Three Egyptian Officials Over 2016 Kidnapping of Student Giulio Regeni, Clears a Fourth

A Rome court on Monday, September 28, 2026, convicted three Egyptian security officials of kidnapping Giulio Regeni, the 28-year-old Cambridge University PhD student found tortured and dumped on a Cairo roadside a decade ago. It took Italy ten years to get even this far, and the men will likely never spend a day in prison.

Judge Paola Roja found Major Magdi Sharif of Egypt's General Intelligence Service, Colonel Ather Kamal, Cairo's former investigations chief, and police Colonel Hisham Helmy guilty of "aggravated kidnapping," sentencing each to 10 years, according to Reuters. A fourth defendant, Major General Tarek Sabir, the former head of state security, was acquitted. The judge also dismissed a "conspiracy to commit aggravated murder" charge against Sharif. Nobody was convicted of killing Regeni. Prosecutors had asked for life imprisonment for Sharif and 17 years and six months for the other three, according to Reuters.

All four men were tried in absentia under an Italian law that allows prosecution of crimes committed abroad against Italian citizens even when the accused can't be located. None have ever responded publicly to the charges. Rome Chief Prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi told reporters, "We achieved this result despite what can be described as less than wholehearted cooperation from the Egyptian authorities," and said he would review the ruling before deciding whether to appeal, Reuters reported.

Regeni disappeared in Cairo on January 25, 2016, while researching Egyptian trade unions, a subject Al Jazeera and Reuters both note Egyptian authorities treat as politically sensitive. His body was found roughly a week to nine days later on the outskirts of the city. A post-mortem found extensive torture: five broken teeth, 15 fractured bones, and letters carved into his flesh, according to details from the family's lawyer cited by Gulf News, which also reported his mother said she recognized him only by "the tip of his nose."

Egypt's version, and why it never held up in court

Egypt has consistently denied any state role in Regeni's death. Italian and Egyptian prosecutors initially investigated jointly, but the two sides split. Cairo initially blamed a criminal gang it said was killed in a police shootout, then later said Regeni's killers were unknown, according to Al Jazeera and The Straits Times. Italian prosecutors argued the opposite: that Egyptian security officials abducted and tortured Regeni because they suspected his academic work made him a foreign spy.

That dispute over who did it, and whether Egypt's shootout story was true or a cover story, was never resolved by an independent joint finding. It's a contested factual claim between two governments, and Monday's verdict doesn't settle the murder question at all. Gulf News's headline called it "partial justice" precisely because the murder charge "remains unresolved."

A legitimate fairness concern, not just Egyptian spin

A first trial in 2021 was thrown out because Italian prosecutors couldn't prove they'd properly notified the suspects of the case against them, a real due-process problem, not a technicality invented to protect Cairo. Italy's Constitutional Court cleared the way for a second trial against all four defendants in September 2023 by loosening that notification requirement, according to Gulf News. Defense lawyers argued unsuccessfully that the case improperly lumped the defendants together without tying specific acts to specific men.

The Italian outlet Il Foglio went further than the wire coverage, arguing the judiciary "bent the rules" to reach a verdict at all, calling the proceeding "thoroughly anomalous" because it featured defendants whose whereabouts, and even whether they're alive, remain unknown, along with what the outlet described as surreal testimony and a compromised right to a fair trial. Convicting men who were never notified in any meaningful sense, who couldn't mount a real defense, and who may not even be alive, strains ordinary due-process norms that would apply in a normal criminal case. Whether Italian law's in-absentia framework for crimes against its own citizens abroad justifies that tradeoff is a legitimate legal debate.

Regeni family lawyer Alessandra Ballerini called the verdict a victory regardless, telling reporters, "From today, people around the world can feel safer. Impunity can be defeated," according to Reuters.

The practical outcome is unchanged by any of that debate: three convicted men, sentenced to 10 years apiece, are not in Italian custody and almost certainly never will be. Reuters and Al Jazeera both note extradition is highly unlikely given the state of Italy-Egypt relations. Lo Voi's decision on whether to appeal the acquittal of Sabir, and the dismissal of the murder-conspiracy charge, is still pending.