The parents of Giulio Regeni,
Claudio and Paola, on Monday appealed to Pope Francis to bring
up the case of the Italian student tortured and murdered in
Cairo when he visits Egypt on April 28-29.
"We are sure," Paola Regeni said in a press conference at the
Senate, "that the pope cannot fail to remember Giulio on this
trip, joining our concrete bid for truth to finally get peace".
The Regenis said that 14 "surreal" months had passed with no
satisfactory response from Egypt over the abduction and murder
of their son.
They noted that Cairo Prosecutor-General Nabil Ahmed
Sadek had promised them he would hand over video footage of when
their son was last seen at a metro stop, as well as "the entire
file on Giulio", but "none of this has happened yet".
The Regenis' lawyer urged Egypt to "emerge from its
outrageous silence" on the case.
The chair of the Senate human rights committee, Luigi
Manconi, said "it was a State murder, there's no excuse for
Egypt's inertia".
Italy has been pressing Egypt to work harder to fins the
truth about Regeni, a Cambridge doctoral student doing reearsch
into Egyptian trade unions.
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.
On 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 files on Regeni requested by Rome
prosecutors "be sent as soon as possible".
Earlier last 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 last 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".
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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