Union leader says he reported Regeni

(ANSA) - Rome, December 29 - 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.