Egypt's prosecutor general on
Wednesday said those suspected of abducting, torturing and
murdering Italian student Giulio Regeni in 2016 had yet to be
identified despite the completion of an Italian probe into four
Egyptian intelligence officers.
"Those responsible remain unknown," said a statement from the
PG's office.
It said the prosecutor, Hamada al Sawi, had instructed police to
keep looking for suspects.
Maintaining that a trial in Italy would be unjustified, Sawi
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 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.
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