Italy's Supreme Court last year decided to proceed with the trial of the four officials, and the trial will be held in absentia.
The trial of four Egyptian security officers accused of kidnapping and killing an Italian student in Cario began on Tuesday in Italy after long delays in a legality case.
Giulio Regeni, a graduate student at the University of Cambridge in the UK, disappeared in the Egyptian capital in January 2016 while researching street vendor unionism as part of his doctoral thesis.
A month after his disappearance, the 28-year-old's body was found on the side of a highway outside Cairo, with cigarette burns, broken teeth and broken bones. An autopsy revealed that he had been tortured before his death.
Human rights activists also said the marks on his body were reminiscent of those from widespread torture in Egyptian security services facilities.
Regeni's parents, Paola Regeni and Giulio Regeni, attended Tuesday's opening and posed outside the courtroom with a banner reading “The Truth About Giulio Regeni.”
“We have been waiting for this moment for eight years,” Alessandra Ballerini, a lawyer for the Regeni family, said after the brief hearing.
“We ultimately want to see justice brought to justice against the people who caused Julio every conceivable pain in the world.”
Italian prosecutors suspect four Egyptian officials were involved in the killing, but they are being tried in absentia because they have not been able to trace them to issue subpoenas.
Tuesday's hearing marks the second time four Egyptian officials have gone on trial on charges related to Regeni's death. The trial initially began in October 2021, but was quickly halted after the judge questioned whether the charges were warranted when the defendant was not clearly dead. I did.
However, Italy's Supreme Court rejected the decision in September last year on the grounds that Egypt's lack of cooperation should not impede the trial.
Tranquilino Sarno, a public defender for one of the defendants, called on Tuesday for continued efforts to contact the four officials.
He asked the court to allow Egyptian authorities to “officially inform them about this trial in Italy, because today we don't even know if they are still alive.”
Egypt denies claims that it has refused to cooperate with the investigation into Regeni's death, saying its authorities are cooperating with Italian authorities and that the investigation concluded that Regeni's killer is unknown.
Officials also said Italy's investigation was not based on consistent evidence and denied responsibility for the country's security services.
Egyptian police had previously claimed that Regeni was killed during a gunfight with police by a gang that specialized in kidnapping foreigners and stealing their money by impersonating police officers. But an Egyptian judge ruled that the men were not Regeni's killers.
The trial is the first time Egyptian officials have been prosecuted outside the country for crimes that human rights groups say occur on a much larger scale in the North African country.
After preliminary motions on Tuesday, the jury foreman adjourned the trial until March 18.