Italy has rejected Egypt's clearing
of four Egyptian intelligence officers in the 2016 abduction,
torture and murder of Italian student Giulio Regeni as
"unacceptable".
The foreign ministry said it "deemed unacceptable" Egyptian
Prosecutor General Hamada El-Sawy's assertion that the case was
unsolved, the suspects had yet to be identified, and the
expected trial in Italy of the four spies was "unjustified".
The foreign ministry reiterated it had "full confidence in the
work of the Italian judiciary" and said that "it will continue
to act in all Seats, including the European Union, to make sure
that the truth on Giulio Regeni's barbaric murder may finally
emerge".
The statement concluded by saying that "the foreign ministry
hopes the Egyptian prosecutor general agrees with this need for
truth and will furnish the necessary collaboration with Rome
prosecutors".
El-Sawy on Wednesday said those suspected of murdering Regeni in
2016 had yet to be identified despite the completion of an
Italian probe into four of five Egyptian intelligence officers.
"Those responsible remain unknown," said a statement from the
PG's office. It said the prosecutor general had instructed
police to keep looking for suspects.
Maintaining that a trial in Italy would be unjustified, El-Sawy
said "parties hostile to Egypt and Italy want to exploit (the
case) in order to hurt relations" between the two countries.
This is proven, he said, by the fact that Regeni was abducted
and his body found a week later during an Italian trade mission
to Cairo.
Rome prosecutors said December 10 they were ready to file
charges against four Egyptian intelligence service members for
Regeni's murder. The prosecutors sent notification of the
closure of the probe to the four, the formal step that normally
precedes a request to indict. Possible charges include
multi-aggravated abduction of a person and complicity in
aggravated murder, the prosecutors said.
The four who risk trial are General Tariq Sabir and three
subordinates: Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim, Uhsam Helmi, and
Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif. The latter is accused of actually
murdering Cambridge doctoral researcher Regeni.
The Rome prosecutors said Regeni was tortured for days,
resulting in "acute physical suffering" by being subjected to
kicks, punches, being beaten with sticks and bats and cut with
sharp objects, and also being burned with red-hot objects and
slammed into walls. He suffered "the permanent loss of multiple
organs" in the torture, they said, also suffering "numerous
traumatic lesions to the head, face, back and lower limbs".
The communication of the end of the probe was made to
court-appointed Italian lawyers, since the Egyptian security
service members have not stood as possible suspects in the case,
and are expected to be tried in absentia in Italy. Witnesses,
deemed reliable by the prosecutors, say the 28-year-old
Cambridge doctoral researcher was abducted by agents of the
Egyptian National Security Agency on January 25, 2016, the
heavily policed fifth anniversary of the uprising that ousted
former strongman Hosni Mubarak, and taken to at least two
barracks in the subsequent hours.
The young man from Friuli was seen in a barracks near the Dokki
metro stop, where he had been previously last seen, the
witnesses said, and later at another barracks where young
foreigners are usually taken. Rome prosecutors told their Cairo
counterparts about these witness statements, but the Egyptian
magistrates rejected the statements as allegedly unreliable.
Regeni was found dead in a ditch on the Cairo-Alexandria highway
on February 3, 2016, a week after disappearing on the Cairo
metro. He had been tortured so badly that his mother said she
only recognised him by the tip of his nose. At various times
Egypt has advanced differing explanations for his death
including a car accident, a gay lovers' tiff and abduction and
murder by an alleged kidnapping gang that was wiped out after
Regeni's documents were planted in their lair. The student was
researching Cairo street sellers unions for the British
university, a politically sensitive subject. The head of the
street hawkers union had fingered Regeni as a spy.
Lack of cooperation on the case by Egypt led to Rome's
temporarily withdrawing its ambassador from Cairo. Rome recently
drew condemnation from Regeni's parents by announcing the sale
of two frigates to Egypt. Premier Giuseppe Conte said the deal
was on a separate level from cooperation on the Regeni case.
Ex-premier Matteo Renzi, who was in office when Regeni died, has
called for Italy to send a special envoy to Egypt to urge the
Sisi regime to enable the trial of the secret service members.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has repeatedly promised
to help Italy get to the truth about the murder. Italian
journalist Corrado Augias recently returned his Legion d'Honneur
to France after Paris gave Sisi the same honour for services to
relations between the countries. Amnesty International says
Regeni is just one of countless critics of the Cairo regime to
be 'disappeared' every year. Michele Prestipino, the lead Rome
prosecutor, recently thanked the Regeni family for its
"tenacity" in pursuing the truth about their son's murder.
Prestipino's assistant, Sergio Colaiocco, told a parliamentary
commission of inquiry in the case that the "action of defensive
investigation" deployed by the family's lawyer, Alessandra
Ballerini, "was decisive".
Ballerini said at a press conference at the Lower House that
"human rights are not negotiable with oil, weapons and money.
And that is shown by the Regeni family. We shall want the same
firmness and abnegation on the part of those who govern us, so
that they prove that justice is not to be bartered away. That is
a starting point, it has taken five years (to achieve it)."
Regeni's mother Paola Deffendi said "no one would have thought
we would get where we are today. Today is an important stage for
Italian democracy and for Egypt. Nothing will stop us. Our
family fight has become a fight of civilisation for human
rights, which is as if Giulio were acting himself. Giulio has
become a mirror that shines all over the world, showing how
human rights are violated in Egypt every day".
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