Egypt team to fly to Italy with results of student murder probe

A delegation of Egyptian prosecutors and policemen is to fly to Rome on Wednesday to present their findings in the brutal murder of Italian student Giulio Regeni, the prosecution service said.

On March 25, Cairo announced police had killed four members of a criminal gang specialising in abducting foreigners, and that they had found Regeni's passport in the apartment of a sister of one of the slain suspects.

Rome has cast doubt on Cairo's explanation for Regeni's murder, with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi saying Italy "will not stop until we have the truth" and that it would not be "satisfied with some convenient truth".

The Italian media and Western diplomatic sources in Cairo suspect that elements from the Egyptian security services could be behind the 28-year-old Cambridge PhD student's murder.

Cairo has steadfastly denied its security forces were responsible for his death.

"A delegation of members from the general prosecution office and policemen involved in the investigation of the killing of Italian citizen Giulio Regeni will leave Cairo on Wednesday, April 6," the Egyptian prosecution's office said.

The team led by deputy general prosecutor Mostafa Suleiman "will present the results of the investigation conducted by the Egyptian general prosecution in the case so far," it said in a statement.
The delegation was initially scheduled to head to Rome on Tuesday, but the trip was delayed for undisclosed reasons.

Regeni disappeared in central Cairo on January 25, and his body was found nine days later on the side of a motorway, badly mutilated and showing signs of torture.

Regeni had been researching labour movements in Egypt, a sensitive topic, and had written articles critical of the government under a pen name.

He disappeared on the day when Cairo was almost deserted amid a heavy deployment of security forces as the country marked the fifth anniversary of the uprising that ousted longtime leader Hosni Mubarak.

"I won't tell you what they had done to him," Regeni's mother Paola told the Italian parliament recently after seeing her son's battered body.

"I recognised him just by the tip of his nose. The rest of him was no longer Giulio."

She said she had taken a photograph of his mutilated body and was prepared to publish it if Cairo continued to refuse to share the findings of its probe with the Italian police.

Since the 2013 ouster of Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi, rights groups have accused Egypt's security services of carrying out illegal detentions, forced disappearances of activists and torture of detainees.

After Morsi's removal by then army chief and now President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a police crackdown targeting Morsi's supporters has left hundreds dead and tens of thousands jailed.

Hundreds more have been sentenced to death including Morsi himself.
Source :AFP