Italy is frustrated at slow investigation into Cairo killing

When the parents of Giulio Regeni, the 28-year-old Italian research student killed in mysterious and gruesome circumstances in Cairo early this year, held a news conference in the Italian Senate recently, they considered handing out photographs of their son's mutilated body.

In the end, they decided against this because the images were too horrible: “I was able to recognise Giulio only from the tip of his nose.

“His face had become oh so small, unrecognisable. You have no idea of what they did to him, of the evil on that face. I was looking at all the evil of the world,” said Paola Deffendi, Giulio’s mother.

Two months on from February 3rd, the day the Cambridge student’s mutilated, half naked body was found on the side of a road on the outskirts of Cairo, the truth about his gruesome, violent death remains unclear.

In turn, different Egyptian authorities have claimed that Regeni had been (a) killed in a traffic accident, (b) kidnapped and killed by a criminal gang that “specialised” in foreigners and (c) the victim of a homosexual encounter gone wrong.

Violent torture

The state of his body would suggest something contrary to these explanations, given that it bore clear evidence of violent torture: seven broken ribs, cuts and scratches all over his body, signs of electrocution to the penis and a brain haemorrhage do not sound like your average traffic accident or lovers’ tiff.

On top of that, Regeni went missing on January 25th, the anniversary of the uprising against former president Hosni Mubarak and a day of a heightened police presence.

An Italian investigation into Regeni’s death has been frustrated by the failure of Egyptian investigators to provide Italian colleagues with requested evidence such as phone taps, CCTV footage and forensic analysis.

The growing impatience in Italy with the pace of the Egyptian investigation was given official voice last week when foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni told the Senate that Italy would take "immediate and proportionate" measures if the Egyptian authorities continued to drag their heels.

Then on Friday, Italy recalled its ambassador to Egypt for urgent consultations. Italian media and public opinion has, all along, suspected state involvement in the killing of Regeni, arguing that he was taken out by the Egyptian police-military-secret service apparatus because of his research on trade union activity in Egypt.

Among the contacts reportedly found among Regini's documents (allegedly discovered following a police raid on the home of a criminal gang member) were those of the Muslim Brotherhood and the April 6th Youth Movement.

Missing

That sense of distrust, too, found expression on the front page of Corriere Della Sera newspaper which carried photographs not only of Regeni but also 19 of the 396 people (“enforced disappearances”) who have gone missing in Egypt in the past eight months, after being taken into police custody.

While Italian and Egyptian investigators held a joint meeting in Rome last week, ostensibly to clear the air, the case remains unclear.

In the absence of hard facts, one intriguing analysis of this sorry story surfaced in Rome daily La Repubblica.

The story was based on an anonymous but plausible email sent to public prosecutor Sergio Colaiocco and Alessandra Ballerini, lawyer for the Regeni family, that appeared to contain inside information on the killing.

The email suggested that because of his research, Regeni was put under surveillance by a senior criminal investigator, Gen Khalid Shalabi, based in Giza, the Cairo district where Regeni went missing on January 25th.

In 2003, Shalabi received a one-year suspended sentence for torturing a man to death.

The email also claimed that, when questioned by police, Regeni said he would answer only in the presence of an Italian diplomat and an interpreter.

In response, it claimed, police tortured him, eventually moving him twice to different police barracks.

It was alleged the torture got progressively worse until it eventually killed him.

The email also detailed the torture allegedly suffered by Regeni: electric shock treatment to his “delicate parts”; being stripped naked and left in a room in which the floor was under water and which was then “electrified” every half hour; food, water and sleep deprivation; bayonet blows and cuts; blows to the face and to the soles of his feet; being suspended from a door; and cigarette burns to the neck and ears.

This case has thrown light on an uncomfortable reality, namely the systematic violation of fundamental human rights by Egypt.

One Italian, currently based in Egypt, told The Irish Times that “it’s worse here than in Pinochet’s Chile”. Giulio Regeni’s parents would agree.