The leader of an Egyptian street
vendors' union that tortured and slain Italian national Giulio
Regeni had been in contact with has said he reported the
visiting scholar to the interior ministry before he was
abducted, tortured and murdered earlier this year.
"Yes, I reported him and handed him over to the interior"
ministry as "every good Egyptian would have done in my place",
Mohamed Abdallah told the Arabic-language edition of the
Huffington Post in an interview quoted by the online edition of
Italian magazine Espresso.
"Giulio and I met a total of six times", Abdallah claimed in
the interview.
"He was a foreign young man who asked strange questions and
spent time with street vendors, questioning them on issues that
concern national security", he also said.
"The last time I spoke with him on the phone was on January
22, I recorded the call and sent it to the interior ministry".
Egyptian security sources in August were first quoted as
saying by Reuters that Abdallah was a frequent visitor of one of
the headquarters of homeland security in Cairo.
A friend of the researcher, Hoda Kamel, a researcher at the
Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights also claimed in
an interview published in March by Rome daily La Repubblica that
the street vendors' union was "infiltrated" by secret services.
Regeni had been in contact with the street vendors' union and
participated in several of their meetings, the last one on
December 14.
The researcher, 28, went missing in Cairo on January 25, the
heavily policed fifth anniversary of the uprising that ousted
former strongman Hosni Mubarak, and his severely tortured,
mutilated body was found on February 3 in a ditch on the city's
outskirts.
Egypt has denied speculation its security forces, who are
frequently accused of brutally repressing opposition, were
involved in the death of the Cambridge doctoral student.
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