Egypt’s public prosecutor has said the killer of the Italian student Giulio Regeni remains unknown as prosecutors in Italy prepare to close the case and move towards bringing at least five Egyptian security officials to trial in Rome.
Egyptian prosecutors said on Monday they would temporarily close their investigation into the murder of Regeni, whose body was found in a ditch on the side of a highway on the outskirts of Cairo in February 2016.
“The Egyptian public prosecution affirms that the perpetrator of the murder of the Italian student is still unknown,” they said, in what they described as a joint statement from both Egyptian and Italian prosecutions.
But the announcement was challenged by Italian prosecutors. “The Egyptian prosecutor has expressed reservations about the solidity of the evidence collected, which he believes are insufficient to support the accusation in court,” a statement said. “However, the public prosecutor of Egypt said he respects the decision that will be taken by the Rome’s public prosecution office.”
Regeni’s body was found with signs of torture, which observers say bore the hallmark of Egypt’s security services. Egyptian authorities have consistently rebuffed any suggestion of responsibility, offering a variety of other theories.
Italian prosecutors have previously named five security officers as suspects and said in October 2020 that they were set to conclude their investigation. An official announcement is expected later this week, even as Cairo continued stonewalling Italy’s efforts to investigate, according to the Italian side.
The media in Italy reported that investigators in Rome have collected multiple testimonies from witnesses, alleging that Regeni was picked up by members of the Egyptian security services.
The witnesses, who have deemed reliable by the prosecutors, say the 28-year-old Cambridge doctoral researcher was abducted by agents of the Egyptian National Security Agency on 25 January 2016 and taken to at least two different police stations in the subsequent hours.
Italian prosecutors informed their Egyptian counterparts about these witness statements at a meeting on 5 November.
Matteo Renzi, who was Italy’s prime minister at the time of the murder, told a parliamentary inquiry last week that his government was only informed of the abduction on 31 January 2016. “If we had known before we could have acted before,” he said.
Italy’s foreign ministry has dismissed his statements, saying: “Italian government institutions and our secret services were informed from the first hours following Giulio’s disappearance on 25 January 2016.”
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