The indictments of four Egyptian security agents over the 2016 kidnapping, torture and murder of Italian doctoral student Giulio Regeni were suspended Thursday night as a Rome judge ruled they had not been properly informed they were being tried in absentia.
The whole case against the four could be extinguished if they are not found, judicial sources said Friday.
A judge said on Thursday eveing it could not be "presumed" that the four knew about the proceedings because of the heavy media coverage, as a previous judge had ruled.
It said the four had to be "effectively" informed of the case against them.
The ruling was a blow to the closely watched first international examination of Egypt's controversial national security policy which has brought widespread condemnation from rights groups.
"This is a setback but we will move forward," said Regeni family attorney Alessandra Ballerini.
The judge sent the case back to the preliminary hearings stage saying efforts to inform the four officers should be redoubled.
The Friuli-born student went missing in Cairo on January 25, 2016.
The brutalised body of the Cambridge University doctoral researcher, who was working on the politically sensitive topic of Egyptian street unions, was found a week later, on February 3, 2016, in a ditch on the road to Alexandria.
He had been tortured so badly his mother said she only recognised him by the tip of his nose.
Ballerini told the court Thursday that fifteen of Regeni's bones were fractured and five of his teeth smashed, while numbers had been carved into his skin.
National Security General Tariq Sabir and his subordinates, Colonels Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim and Uhsam Helmi, and Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif, were on trial at the third Court of Assizes in Rome.
In an important signal, the Italian premier's office decided to stand as a civil plaintiff in the case.
Also standing as plalnitiffs were Regeni's parents, Claudio Regeni and Paola Deffendi, who were in court Thursday along with Regeni's sister Irene.
Rome prosecutors say that Regeni, 28, was tortured for days, resulting in "acute physical suffering" by being subjected to kicks, punches, beaten with sticks and bats and cut with sharp objects, and also being burned with red-hot objects and slammed into walls.
Egypt's prosecutor general, Hamada al Sawi, has said "there is insufficient evidence to prove the charges".
At various times Egypt has advanced differing explanations for Regeni's death including a car accident, a gay lovers' tiff and abduction and murder by an alleged kidnapping gang that was wiped out after Regeni's documents were planted in their lair.
The head of the street hawkers union had fingered Regeni as a possible spy.
Lack of cooperation on the case by Egypt led to Rome's temporarily withdrawing its ambassador from Cairo for a spell.
But relations continued, a fact that the Regenis condemned, as well as the sale of two Italian-built warships to Cairo.
The trial opened with Rome prosecutor Sergio Colaiocco saying the four defendants had constantly tried to avoid a trial and did not recognise that they were being tried in absentia.
Lawyers for Regeni's family said they wanted the truth after years of cover-ups and defamation including an Egyptian film on Regeni which they have also condemned.
Prosecutor Colaiocco denounced "a complex action of the four defendants, and some of their colleagues, carried out since 2016 and which continued until recently, to block, slow down and avoid that the trial would take place in Italy. For five years they have been trying to avoid this", noting that "they are feigning ignorance".
"Here we do not have conclusive evidence, a wiretap. However, there are at least 13 elements, " the prosecutor said, "that since 2016 until today, put together, show that the agents are trying to avoid standing trial. The question is: why are the defendants not here in this courtroom, are they unaware or feigning ignorance? Defendants have the right to receive all notifications regarding the trial but they must also choose their domicile. Egypt on this matter never responded. In general, out of the 64 rogatory letters sent to Cairo, 39 were not replied to. We have done everything we could to carry out this trial and I am convinced that today the four defendants know that the first hearing is being held." Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi told the Visegrad group Wednesday that Cairo would not accept diktats on human rights from the EU.
The European Parliament has been among the many bodies to have condemned the murder and called for Egypt to help bring the perpetrators to justice.
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