Giulio Regeni“We ask to write with a pseudonym for security reasons”. This is one of the emails a friend of Giulio Regeni sent to il manifesto last December 2015. The circle of friends of the Italian researcher is a key to disentangling this apparently irresolvable mystery on the arrest and torture of Giulio Regeni.
Let’s try to keep these two moments as distinct. It is almost sure that at least six days passed between his disappearance, on January 25 2016 downtown Cairo, and his death. Six days of torture, a “slow death”, as confirmed by the Italian autopsy.
Moreover, the Italian public prosecutor, Mr. Sergio Colaiocco, added two points germane to reaching the truth on Giulio’s murder: firstly, on his body there are evident signs of torture made by “professional hands”, in other words this is a work that only the Egyptian Amn el-Dawla (National Security) could have perpetrated, as it does so often with Egyptian political prisoners; secondly, Giulio Regeni was not being monitored before January 25 2016, and the reasons for his death are related to the fieldwork research he was carrying out in Egypt. These two points terminally refute the most ignominious allegations, often advanced of late by many Egyptians regarding any foreigner sitting in a Cairo café with local people: “you are a spy”. On the contrary, Giulio Regeni was a dedicated and meticulous researcher, an “avant-guarde for Europe”, as the Italian writer Erri De Luca described him in an interview with us. Nothing that could prompt suspicion emerged from searches of his laptop and of his contacts in Egypt.
