"As feared, after a year and seven months of pre-trial detention, Patrick Zaki goes to trial. The first hearing is scheduled for tomorrow, September 14. He is challenged with a 2019 written in defense of the Coptic minority".
This was announced on Twitter by the spokesperson of Amnesty International in Italy Riccardo Noury.
Patrick Zaki faces a sentence of up to five years in prison in the trial against him which begins tomorrow. The hearings will take place in Mansoura, in the north of the country, so Zaki, a student of the University of Bologna previously detained in Egypt, is expected to be transferred from Cairo to Mansoura. "Unfortunately - says Riccardo Noury, spokesman for Amnesty International - it was expected that with the end of the 24-month preventive detention approaching, from that huge castle of secret evidence never made available to the defense one of the many would be taken to send him to trial. It is a writing from 2019 in which Patrick allegedly defended the persecuted Coptic minority in Egypt ". It is not clear at the moment how many hearings will take place. Patrick Zaki faces a fine or a sentence of up to five years in prison.
"In recent weeks we had already warned the Italian government that there could be an accelerated development. Now every minute that passes in which Italy does nothing is a minute that is lost dramatically and guiltily". This is the message that Amnesty International, through its spokesman Riccardo Noury, addresses to the Italian government on the eve of the first hearing in the trial of Patrick Zaki, the student of the University of Bologna detained in Egypt on charges of subversive propaganda.