New postponement for Patrick Zaki. The judge in charge of the trial did not appear at the hearing scheduled today in Mansoura, Egypt, and it was all postponed to July 18. This was reported to ANSA by Zaki himself at the end of the very short hearing that was held with a substitute.
What Amnesty International calls Patrick's judicial "nightmare" began with his arrest on 7-8 February 2020 and has lasted for three years and three months, 22 of which he spent in prison. The accusation is based on an article written by the researcher in 2019 about an ISIS attack and two cases of alleged discrimination against Copts, the Christians of Egypt.
During the pre-trial period, between February 2020 and September 2021, according to what can be reconstructed from media information, Patrick had suffered the trickle of 18 hearings in which extensions of his pre-trial detention passed almost entirely in the Tora prison in Cairo were decided: the renewals, as required by law, in the first five months were 15 days each and then 45. Especially during the first period of the pandemic, in spring 2020 (but on two occasions also in June and November), his judicial story was characterized by nine postponements of the hearings for the renewal of pre-trial detention.
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