(ANSA) - ROME, DEC 12 - A witness on Thursday told the Rome trial in absentia of four Egyptian security officers accused of having kidnapped, tortured and killed Giulio Regeni in January-February 2016 that one of the suspects admitting to "cutting up" the Italian doctoral student.
    The witness said they heard Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdel Sharif make the admission in a restaurant in Nairobi in September 2017.
    The witness told the court that he heard Sharif say: "in our country, we had the case of an Italian academic who we thought was CIA and also Mossad. He was a problem because he was popular among ordinary people. We finally caught him: we cut him up, we destroyed him. I hit him'".
    Sharif is on trial along with National Security General Tariq Sabir and two others, who are not attending after Egypt refused to notify them of the proceedings.
    Cambridge University researcher Regeni, 28, was allegedly tortured to death between January 25 and February 3 2016 after the Egyptian security officers decided he was a spy, after he was fingered by a the leader of a street union, a politically sensitive area of the north African country. (ANSA).