Regeni docs must be sent to Rome (3)

(ANSA) - Rome, March 23 - Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano said he had asked Egyptian counterpart Sameh Choukry "in a very clear and frank way" to see that all documents on tortured and murdered student Giulio Regeni requested by Rome prosecutors "be sent as soon as possible". "We have only one aim, the truth", Alfano said on Italian TV after meeting Shoukry on the sidelines of a US anti-ISIS summit in Washington Wednesday. Earlier this month Rome prosecutors said Cairo police who tracked Regeni from December 8 2015 to January 22 2016 gave false and reticent accounts of their activities. Explaining a fresh request for information from their Cairo counterparts, namely the testimony of five other agents involved in keeping tabs on the tortured and murdered Italian student, the Rome prosecutors said they have already obtained five pieces of testimony and have now filed a request for the other five. Investigators said their probe had taken them to members of a "public apparatus" and in particular individuals who had a place where they could keep Regeni for at least a week - a safe place, certainly not a home, where they could torture him far from prying eyes.
    At a meeting with Alfano earlier this month, Shoukry reiterated that Cairo would do its "all" to get at the truth about the Cambridge doctoral student from northeastern Italy, Alfano said after the meeting.
    Egypt, Alfano said, "wants ties with Italy to be fully restored", referring to the current lack of an ambassador in Cairo, because of the case.
    Alfano said Cairo was "prepared to retrieve the truth out of any drawer it might be in, giving a helping hand until the end to find those responsible for the murder".
    Regeni, 28, went missing in the Egyptian capital on January 25, 2016, on the heavily policed fifth anniversary of the uprising that ousted former strongman and president Hosni Mubarak.
    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.
    Egyptian and Italian prosecutors have been working on the case but Rome has yet to send a new ambassador to Cairo in protest at the lack of progress.
    At the end of January the deputy head of the Egyptian parliament's foreign affairs committee, Tarek El Khouly, repeated that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi wants to find the people who tortured and murdered Regeni.
    "I think there is an order from the Egyptian political leaders, from the president in person, to the general prosecutor to discover who killed Regeni, whoever that may be," El Khouly told ANSA.
    "I think that, in any part of the world, mistakes are made by security apparatus. Perhaps it is a crime concerning an Egyptian security apparatus, perhaps not," said El Khouly, adding that the Regeni case had been politically "exploited" in both Egypt and Italy and urging a "separation" between Italy-Egypt ties and the case.
    It recently emerged that the head of the Egyptian street sellers' trade union secretly filmed Regeni for the Cairo police in December 2015. The union official, Mohammed Abdallah, said he had agreed to do his patriotic duty because Regeni was a "spy".