Four Egyptian security officials have gone back on trial in absentia in Rome on charges related to the kidnap and murder of an Italian student in Cairo. Giulio Regeni, 28, had been conducting research when he was abducted in January 2016. His body was found nine days later, dumped on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital, bearing extensive signs of torture. The murder severely strained ties between Italy and Egypt, and Italian MPs later accused Cairo of being “openly hostile” to attempts to try the suspects. Italian judges threw out the first trial the day it opened in 2021 because prosecutors had not been able to officially inform the four suspects of the procedures against them. But in a significant ruling by the constitutional court last September, it was decided that the trial could proceed even without formal notification to the accused, as Egyptian authorities had failed to provide their whereabouts. “We had been waiting for this moment for eight years,” Regeni’s lawyer, Alessandra Ballerini, told reporters. “We hope to be able to finally have a trial against those who have done all the harm in the world to Giulio.” The four defendants were named in original court documents as Gen Tariq Sabir, Cols Athar Kamel and Uhsam Helmi, and Maj Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif. They all face charges of kidnapping, and Sharif is charged also with inflicting the fatal injuries. As in 2021, they will not attend the trial. “They are absolutely untraceable,” the the defence lawyer Tranquillino Sarno, appointed by the court to represent Kamel, said last week. Because of this, he said, even if they were convicted, they would “certainly not serve their sentences”. The Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi and the former foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni are among the names on the witness lists filed by the parties in the trial. Regeni was in Cairo to research union activities among street vendors as part of his doctoral thesis. He disappeared after leaving his flat in the Dokki neighbourhood of Cairo on his way to meet friends. After a frantic search by his parents and friends, his body was found at the side of a desert highway on 4 February, showing signs of torture. His mother said she could identify him only from “the tip of his nose”. The precise nature of the torture that Regeni was subjected to and the location where his corpse was found, close to a detention facility used by Egypt’s national security agency, have long drawn suspicions internationally that members of Egypt’s security agencies were responsible for his murder. Yet at home, Egyptian officials offered a very different view. “The security services are the ones who will say who did it,” the then vice-minister of justice and forensics expert, Shaaban al-Shamy, told the Guardian in 2016. Egypt later admitted that the student had been under surveillance before his death. Italian prosecutors’ efforts to investigate were frustrated from the start. Italy sent a team of investigators to Cairo in January 2016 but they were forced to run a parallel investigation rather than cooperate fully with their Egyptian counterparts, who performed the initial autopsy on Regeni’s body in Egypt without any Italian officials present. Italian investigators repeatedly requested CCTV footage from the Cairo metro on the day Regeni disappeared. When Egypt eventually supplied it in 2018, it contained what the Italians described as “unexplained gaps”, rendering it useless as evidence. An Italian parliamentary commission found in December 2021 – weeks after the first trial was thrown out – that Egypt’s security agency was to blame for Regeni’s death. It accused Egypt’s judiciary of acting in an “obstructive and openly hostile manner” by failing to disclose the whereabouts of the defendants. In December 2020, all four suspects as well as a fifth were cleared of responsibility for Regeni’s murder by Egypt’s public prosecutor, who said he would drop the case.