A crack, finally, for Patrick Zaki. The Egyptian student will be released from prison “even if he has not been acquitted” of the charges: this was reported by some lawyers at the end of the hearing in Mansura. Zaki will be released from prison on the same day today, December 7th, or in the next few days.
The release takes place pending the next hearing, scheduled for February 1st. “We have learned that the decision is the release but we have no other details at the moment,” explained the lawyer Hoda Nasrallah.
“Well, well, thank you”: raising his thumb, Patrick Zaki had replied a few hours earlier to an Italian diplomat who asked him how he was. The student responded from the defendants’ cage shortly before the hearing began. It was learned that the diplomat was able to speak to him briefly to represent the closeness of the Italian institutions and Patrick thanked for what Italy and the Embassy are doing for him. The Italian diplomat had also talked to Patrick’s parents shortly before.
Patrick, during the 4 minutes in which he was in court outside the cage, was dressed in white, the color symbol of the accused, wore a black mask lowered on his chin, pigtail, glasses and rocked on his feet. Beside him, facing the judge’s bench, were three lawyers and a policeman. It is unclear where Patrick was taken during the break in the hearing, which has not yet been resumed.
The judicial affair
Patrick Zaki was born on June 19, 1991 in Mansura, Egypt, into a family belonging to the country’s Coptic Christian minority. He is a human rights activist and carries out research for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, an Egyptian NGO, where he mainly deals with gender issues. In 2020 she is on leave at the University of Bologna to attend the Erasmus Mundus Master in Women’s and Gender Studies. The experience ends when he is kidnapped at the Cairo airport.