Regeni mum 'saw world's evil'

(by Stefania Fumo).
    (ANSA) - Rome, March 29 - The mother of slain Italian student Giulio Regeni said Tuesday she has seen "the world's evil" on her son's face. "At the mortuary I only recognized Giulio by the tip of his nose," Paola Deffendi said a press conference at the Senate in Rome. "What they did to him is unspeakable".
    Regeni, 28, was a Cambridge University doctoral student and a visiting scholar at the American University in Cairo (AUC). He went missing January 25 and his badly burned, stabbed and mutilated body turned up in a ditch on the outskirts of Cairo on February 3. "In Italy we have not seen torture since (the time of) anti-Fascism, but Giulio was not at war - he went to do research," Deffendi added. She continued continued by saying the family trusts in a firm response from the government should Egyptian investigators fail to come up with convincing answers at a meeting with their Italian colleagues in Rome on April 5. "If April 5 turns out to be an empty day we trust in a strong response from our government - a very, very strong one," she said. "We have been waiting for answers about Giulio since January 25".
    Since then, Egyptian authorities have come up with several versions of what happened to Regeni, none of which the Italian government or the murder victim's family have found convincing.
    Deffendi also said the family knew "viscerally" that their son was not in the secret services, as initially alleged. "At a visceral level, we knew our son was not in the secret services - I say so with all due respect to those who work in intelligence," she said, adding that her and her husband's relationship with their son, who left home a decade ago, was extremely close.
    Egyptian Chief Prosecutor Nabil Sadeq pledged in a phone call on Monday to Rome Prosecutor Giuseppe Pignatone to turn crucial case evidence over to Italian investigators on April 5.
    This includes cell phone records as well as CCTV footage from the area near Regeni's home in Cairo, his departure and arrival subway stations on the night he disappeared, and the area where his body was found on February 5.