Italy's foreign minister has hailed Patrick Zaki's release from detention in Egypt with a Facebook post of a photo of the rights advocate hugging his mother outside a local police station.
"An embrace is worth more than words. Welcome back Patrick!" Luigi Di Maio wrote in a caption to the picture.
Italian premier Mario Draghi has vowed to keep following the case of 29-year-old Zaki, who was freed from custody after nearly two years of detention in prison on charges of spreading fake news about Egypt.
Zaki's release from custody in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura came a day after a local court adjourned his trial until February.
The gender rights researcher and post-graduate student at the University of Bologna was held at Cairo airport in January last year after writing an opinion piece on discrimination against Coptic Christians in Egypt.
Zaki's arrest and trial sparked a wave of student protests in Italy, as well as a formal request to the government by MPs to grant him citizenship.
The case has drawn international condemnation of Egypt's president and former general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Sisi denies charges by Italian prosecutors that members of Egypt's security services were behind the 2016 disappearance, torture and murder of researcher Giulio Regeni - a case that caused a diplomatic rift and severely strained bilateral ties.
