Regeni's parents ask pope to speak (3)

(ANSA) - Rome, April 3 - 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".