Patrick Zaki, preventive detention extended again: another 45 days of imprisonment

• Zaki's letter: "I will continue to fight until I return to Bologna"

• Zaki case.

  Unanimous motion of the chamber: the government gives citizenship

Share

August 23, 2021Pre-trial detention for Patrick Zaki has been extended for another 45 days. This was announced by a lawyer of the Egyptian student of the University of Bologna, Hoda Nasrallah. "45 days", "it's official", the lawyer wrote in messages, hinting that, before the prosecutor's office closed, she managed to get notification of the outcome of yesterday's hearing from the clerks.

"Yesterday there was no interrogation, but only a renewal of his detention. The last interrogation took place on July 13, which was the first since his arrest in February 2020, but he has not been interrogated since": referring to Patrick Zaki, he wrote it in messages to Ansa Lobna Darwish, a representative of "Eipr", the NGO for the defense of human and civil rights for which the Egyptian student of the University of Bologna in pre-trial detention in Egypt was a researcher for over half a year.

"We still do not know what that interrogation was aimed at, but we fear it was a way to prolong, even more, his detention and his suffering", Darwish merely added, commenting on information circulated yesterday about "investigations" subject of the hearing held in those hours.

Yesterday evening, after the hearing, the lawyer Nasrallah had predicted that the 30-year-old's pre-trial detention in the Tora prison in Cairo would be renewed but, in the absence of a formalization, he had not been able to indicate the number of days. The lawyer expected a notification between today and tomorrow. After a first five-month phase of fortnightly renewals delayed by the Covid emergency, for over a year Patrick's case has been in that of 45-day extensions.

The researcher was arrested on February 7, 2020, that is more than 18 months ago, but the pre-trial detention in Egypt can last two years with the possibility of extensions if, during the investigation, new elements of accusation emerge. If he goes to trial, according to Amnesty International, Patrick faces up to 25 years in prison. The charges against him are based on ten posts from a Facebook account that his lawyers consider fake, but which have configured, among other things, the "dissemination of false news", "incitement to protest" and "incitement to violence and terrorist crimes ".

The mobilization of politics and civil society in his favor in Italy has institutionally culminated in a request from the Chamber of Deputies to the Government to provide him with Italian citizenship.