Giulio Regeni
Three men have been charged with the kidnapping of Giulio Regeni nearly 11 years after his mutilated body was found in a ditch outside of the Egyptian capital Cairo.
An Italian court concluded on Tuesday that the Egyptian regime was involved in the torture and murder of Giulio.
Giulio was a PhD student at Cambridge university researching independent trade unions in Egypt. He went missing on 25 January 2016, during the five-year anniversary of the revolution that ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Nine days later Giulio’s half-naked body was found. He had over 30 broken bones, burn marks and stab wounds that are believed to have been inflicted over four days of torture.
An autopsy concluded that Giulio was killed by having his neck broken.
Letters of the alphabet were found carved into his flesh. It is a distinctive form of torture known to be used by the regime of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who pushed through a counter-revolution in Egypt.
Giulio’s mother said his body was so mutilated that she could only identify him by the tip of his nose.
On Tuesday, colonels Usham Helmi and Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim and major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif were sentenced to ten years in prison. A fourth man, General Tariq Sabir, was acquitted of all charges.
The location of all four is unknown. They were tried in absentia. Their own defence lawyers said that they had never spoken to them. They are unlikely to be extradited to face punishment.
For a decade the Egyptian regime has claimed it had no involvement. It has given other explanations for Giulio’s death—including saying he died in a car crash, a failed drug deal or a violent robbing.
Giulio’s murder in 2016 shone a spotlight on the bloody regime of el-Sisi.
From January to September 2025 alone, 44 detainees died in Egyptian custody. Thousands of activists, political opponents and civilians are being held in inhumane conditions and torture is widespread.
The week that Regeni was kidnapped and murdered, thousands were arrested in a wave of repression.
Police and military officers flooded the streets of Cairo to send a warning of what would come if anti-government protests took off again. For weeks, they arrested political activists en masse.
Western powers sustain the butcher Sisi—including Italy. Only in July this year, fascist prime minister Georgia Meloni and Sisi were in contact to “boost the close relations” between their countries.
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