(ANSA) – CAIRO, DEC 06 – The third hearing in the trial of Patrick Zaki, the Egyptian student of the University of Bologna under accusation for spreading false information through news articles and detained for exactly 22 months.
As announced by one of his lawyers, the hearing will be used by his pool of lawyers to present a defense brief prepared on the basis of access to the obtained with the previous session, that of 28 September last.
The single judge of the State Security Court for minor offenses in Patrick’s hometown, in addition to possibly replying to the memory during the session, will decide whether to update the hearing again or to pronounce a sentence of conviction or final acquittal, has provided for a representative of Eipr, the Egyptian NGO for which Patrick worked as a researcher.
The 30-year-old was recently transferred from the Tora prison in Cairo, where he spent most of his custody, to a prison in Mansura according to an activist friend of his.
As in all hearings, Italian diplomats and, at the request of the Italian Embassy, also from other countries will go to court to monitor the process as they had done before for the renewal sessions of pre-trial detention.
Patrick was arrested on February 7, 2020, returning to Egypt for a vacation and the 19 months of custody were justified with allegations of subversive propaganda made through ten posts on Facebook. The indictment took place instead for “spreading false news in and out of the country “on the basis of three articles written by Zaki, including one from 2019 on Christians in Egypt persecuted by Isis and discriminated against by sections of Muslim society. The researcher and activist faces up to five years in prison. (HANDLE).
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Source From: Ansa
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