But Egypt’s interior minister retorted that his country’s investigators are working hard to solve the case and insisted Regeni had never been arrested, let alone picked up by his country’s security forces. The body of student Giulio Regeni was found in a ditch outside the Egyptian capital Cairo, on 2 February.
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Many have been imprisoned and suffered torture at the hands of the state.
In a press conference on Monday, Interior Minister Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar denied the student had ever been arrested and said police were “very annoyed” and “frustrated” by accusations that security forces killed him. On Wednesday, Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm reported that, according to sources inside the investigations team, 37 people had been arrested in connection with his death.
He said Egypt’s security agencies are “known for integrity and transparency”, adding that the student’s killing was a “criminal incident for sure”. Italy’s Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said the results indicate the student was exposed to “inhuman, animal-like” violence.
While opening details have been released, analysis of tissue and body fluid, which could help pinpoint or at least narrow the time frame when Mr Regeni died, are expected to take several days. The Cairo prosecutor in charge of the case, though, spoke of knife wounds, cigarette burns and torture – what he described as a slow death.
He asserted that the National Council for Human Rights had stated in a series of media reports that the vast majority of purported cases of disappearances had been unfounded after investigation and that authorities were fully cooperating with the Council to review any alleged cases.
Regeni was being honored by Italy’s leading museum for Egyptian art and history. “So we are moving on two different and parallel views of what happened”.
This file image posted online after the January 25, 2016 disappearance of Italian graduate student Giulio Regeni in Cairo, Egypt shows Reggeni in a graphic used in an online campaign, #whereisgiulio seeking information on his whereabouts. The letter called on Egyptian authorities to “cooperate with an independent and impartial investigation into all instances of forced disappearances, cases of torture and deaths in detention”.
Egyptian security forces had been extremely active on that day and the weeks before, raiding apartments, checking IDs, and searching baggage in order to prevent protests or violence on the fifth anniversary of a popular uprising that ousted longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
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He said no suspects had yet been arrested.
