Rome, 13 September 2021 – An endless nightmare for Patrick Zaki: after 1 year and 7 months of pre-trial detention in Egypt, he will now have to face the process. And tomorrow is scheduled first hearing. This was confirmed today by the spokesman of Amnesty International in Italy Riccardo Noury: to the Egyptian student of the University of Bologna, in prison in Cairo since February 2020 and who last June completed 30 years, a 2019 written in defense of the Coptic minority is disputed. Zaki risks one sentence of up to 5 years of prison. The hearings will take place a Mansoura, in the north of the country.
The accusation of terrorism would have dropped, but that of fake news spread both in Egypt and abroad: this is the crime that tomorrow the judges of the court of Mansoura, the hometown of Zaki, will challenge the accused. A source inside the “Patrick Libero” international campaign he explained to news agencies that “the prosecution has not been able to prove the spread of false news through social networks since those posts on Facebook do not exist”, a point repeatedly reiterated in recent months by the student’s lawyers. “So – continued the activist – they built the whole accusatory system on an article published in 2019 on a website, in which Zaki denounced the persecutions against the Coptic Christian minority. And this is much worse”.
The evolution in the legal case of Zaki for the spokesman for Amnesty International Riccardo Noury ”shows that in Egypt the situation of human rights is extremely seriousand “. Interviewed by Rai News24, Noury noted that what is also worrying is the fact that” no one is realizing this situation, except of course some components of Egyptian civil society and Italy “. Noury’s reference he is in the campaign born in Italy from Bologna, and supported by Amnesty, for the student’s liberation.
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