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.
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".
Deffendi said "we ask the commission of inquiry to clear up
Italian responsibilities, we refer to all those grey areas. What
happened in the Italian institutions from that January 25 to
February 3? How come Giulio, an Italian citizen, was not saved
in a country that was friendly and which continues to be
friendly?"
She said that otherwise, "all the Italians who go abroad may
well say they do not feel safe".
She added, on her video link with the House press conference:
"The 'good' media should work on Egypt, should recount Egypt,
and that way we will help the Egyptian people too. Carry out
investigative journalism, ask politicians 'what are you doing,
what is Premier Conte doing for the truth about Giulio? And
Foreign Minister Di Maio? Bilateral relations with Egypt have
become ever more a friendship".
Regeni's father Claudio called for Italy to again withdraw its
ambassador from Cairo, saying that the two countries had
recently seen a "normalisation of relations and the development
of mutual interests in the economic, financial and military
fields, as shown by the recent sale of the frigates, and in
tourism, avoiding any clash".
He said the search for the truth of his son's death had been
placed "on a secondary level" with respect to these interests.
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