Family of slain Italian student demands strong response to Egypt

The mother of an Italian student who was found dead in Cairo last month described the pain of seeing her son’s tortured body and demanded a tough response from Rome if Egypt fails to uncover the truth.

“I won’t tell you what they had done to him. I recognised him just by the tip of his nose. The rest of him was no longer Giulio,” said Paola Regeni, the student’s mother, in the family’s first public remarks on the case on Tuesday.

Paola warned that the family might release a photograph of her son’s body if authorities did not make progress on his murder investigation.

Egyptian police are now expected to hand over key evidence regarding the murder of 28-year-old Giulio Regeni to their Italian counterparts on 5 April.

Luigi Manconi, the president of the human rights commission in the Italian senate, said that if Cairo failed to do so, Italy should consider recalling its ambassador to Egypt for consultation.

Manconi said that if the information was not handed over, Italy’s foreign ministry “should declare Egypt an unsafe country, which would without a doubt have a not insignificant effect on the numbers of tourists” there.

The family’s lawyer, Alessandra Ballerini, said Egyptian investigators “must bring us everything that’s missing, including the phone records and data collected from the cell sites in the area and the security video footage from near the metro where he disappeared, and the area in which his body was found”.

Regeni disappeared in January in Cairo. His mutilated body was found in a roadside ditch nine days later.