2023-07-20 00:03:13
Patrick Zaki will return to Italy today.The pardon granted yesterday by Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al Sisi, which arrived the day after his sentence to three years in prison by a Mansoura Court for having spread alleged false news in a post on Coptic minorities, thus marks the end of a three-year nightmare. The return to Italy of the student from the Alma Mater of Bologna was announced yesterday evening by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni through a video message posted on social media: “Today Patrick Zaki received the pardon from the President of the Egyptian Republic and I want to thank President Al Sisi for this very important gesture. Since our first meeting in November – explained the premier -, I have never stopped asking the question and I have always found his attention and availability. And I want to thank the intelligence and diplomats, both Italian and Egyptians, who in recent months have never stopped working to arrive at the desired solution. Tomorrow Patrick Zaki will return to Italy and I wish him from the bottom of my heart a life of serenity and success”, Meloni’s words.
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According to some sources, the pardon granted by the president to Sisi to Patrick Zaki would be the result of “a long and constant negotiation between the Italian and Egyptian governments”, which saw the premier, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, who in recent months has carried out various missions in Egypt, and Italian external intelligence (Aise) as protagonists.
The nightmare for the student of the master Gemma in Women’s and Gender Studies at the Alma Mater University of Bologna had begun on February 7, 2020, when he was taken behind bars in the notorious Tora prison, after being stopped at Cairo airport . In the months that followed, hearings followed in which Zaki’s preventive detention was renewed each time for 15 or 45 days, despite numerous appeals and initiatives from the Italian government, politicians, activists and associations.
Zaki had been stopped upon his arrival in Egypt to visit his family, a period of vacation which instead had cost him his arrest. Only in the last months of his detention had he been transferred to al-Mansoura prison, the city where Zaki was born on June 16, 1991.
The charges mentioned in the arrest warrant were threat to national security, inciting illegal protests, subversion, spreading false news, propaganda for terrorism. In particular, according to the Egyptian authorities, the researcher, who just a couple of weeks ago graduated remotely, carried out subversive propaganda through some posts published on Facebook.
Instead, the indictment had taken place for “dissemination of false news inside and outside the country” on the basis of three articles written by Zaki. Among the texts accused, one stands out, written in 2019 on Coptic Christians in Egypt persecuted by the self-styled Islamic State and discriminated against by some elements of Muslim society. Zaki himself belongs to the Egyptian Coptic community.
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