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".
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