The Egyptian team in charge of investigating the murder of an Italian researcher in Cairo will head to Rome in the upcoming days to foster mutual coordination on the case, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said in an interview published on Wednesday.
“Egypt is keen to provide security and protection to all its visitors, particularly Italians,” Sisi told Italy's La Repubblica newspaper.
The body of Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old visiting scholar at the American University in Cairo, was found in February in a ditch on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital, marred by torture marks and bruises. A number of media reports accused Egyptian security forces of torturing the Italian student to death, which the Egyptian interior ministry has denied.
Regeni, a Ph.D. candidate who was conducting research on trade unions in Egypt, had gone missing on the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 25 Uprising that toppled long-serving president Hosni Mubarak.
Sisi vowed in the interview to “spare no efforts and continue to work with the Italian authorities to arrest the perpetrators” and bring them to justice.
He described the incident as “an individual act that no other Italian has ever faced” in Egypt.
Egypt is currently trying to revive its tourism sector, which was a main source of income the 2011 Uprising triggered four years of political turmoil, taking its toll on the sector.
“The timing of this incident is intriguing and raises several questions. ... Why did it happen when bilateral relations gather unprecedented momentum both politically and economically? Are there any beneficiaries who seek to impede relations, given the turbulent situation in the region?” La Repubblica quoted Sisi as saying on the paper’s English-language website.
Since he was elected president in 2014, Sisi has repeatedly said that Egypt is facing a conspiracy plotted by internal and foreign forces. In a speech he gave in February in Cairo, the Egyptian president said there are forces who want to “bring down Egypt” and work toward driving Egypt toward a “fate similar to that of other” states.
On Mar. 10, the European Parliament (EP) overwhelmingly approved a resolution condemning Regeni’s "abduction" and "savage torture", stressing that the case is not an isolated incident as it comes in the context of "a dramatic increase in reports of torture in police detention stations and other cases of death in custody and enforced disappearances across Egypt under the current leadership."
But the Egyptian foreign ministry responded in a statement accusing the EP’s resolution of lacking “evidence”, adding that it “precedes the investigation that the Egyptian authorities are currently undertaking with the full cooperation of Italian authorities.”
