Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, have been called as witnesses in the unresolved case of Giulio Regeni, the student who was murdered in Cairo in 2016.
The move comes after they both offered assurances that the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, had shown a fresh willingness to collaborate with Italian authorities on the case.
Regeni, 28, was carrying out research on labour unions for a doctorate at Cambridge University when he went missing in Cairo in January 2016. His severely tortured body was later found dumped in the outskirts of the city. Regeni’s body was so badly mutilated that his mother was only able to identify him by the tip of his nose.
A Rome trial in absentia of four Egyptian security officers over Regeni’s killing has been stalled since October 2021 because of Egypt’s refusal to release their addresses so that prosecutors could inform them that they were being tried. Italy’s justice ministry said in December that it had received no response from Egypt to its request for cooperation over the four, who are named in court documents as Gen Tariq Sabir, Col Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim, ColUhsam Helmi and Maj Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif.
Alessandra Ballerini, the lawyer for Regeni’s parents, has called Meloni and Tajani to report to a preliminary hearings judge in Rome on 3 April to clarify the assurances given by Sisi.
Meloni, who came to power in late October, met the Egyptian president on the sidelines of the Cop27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh in early November, saying afterwards that the meeting had touched upon the Regeni case “and cooperation to reach the truth and justice”. After a meeting with Sisi in January, Tajani said he had shown a “new willingness” to collaborate while pledging to do everything to “remove the obstacles” that had made relations between Italy and Egypt tense.
Ballerini told the Italian press: “In light of the statements made to the media by prime minister Meloni and foreign minister Antonio Tajani regarding the assurances from al-Sisi, who allegedly guaranteed he would resolve the situation by removing the obstacles preventing the trial into the kidnapping, torture and murder of Giulio to begin, we ask for information from them on the timing and methods for these solutions.”
Tajani said on Monday: “We want to know the truth and for the judicial process to continue.”
Regeni’s mother, Paola Deffendi, told Italian TV: “What happened to Giulio is not a family affair, because a country that fails to achieve justice for what happened to Giulio is a country that does not give security to its own citizens.”
