Deputy Justice Minister of forensic medicine affairs Shabaan Al-Shamy denied on Monday initial autopsy results conducted by an Egyptian coroner for the death of Cambridge PhD student and Italian national Giulio Regeni.
On Monday, several media outlets reported that Al-Shamy had disclosed the initial results of the Egyptian coroner’s investigation. These reports indicated that the main cause of death was blunt force trauma delivered by a sharp object to the back of the head that caused a cranial fracture and severe intracranial haemorrhaging.
Al-Shamy stated that forensic report has not been completed nor has it been released.
Italy urged the Egyptian authorities on Monday to enhance their efforts and cooperate with their investigation on the death of the Italian student Giulio Regeni who was found in a ditch along the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road highway on 3 February, nine days after his disappearance.
This came following new evidences found on Monday during the autopsy conducted in Rome which showed the fingers of the Italian student were broken and his nails were pulled out.
The Associated Press reported on Sunday that the Regeni died after a vertebra in his neck was fractured and he was unable to breathe.
Egyptian authorities have issued conflicting reports regarding the Egyptian autopsy report. The forensic medicine department previously noted signs of torture on the body including cigarette burns, bruises, cuts, and multiple stab wounds. Meanwhile, officials from the Ministry of Interior reported to Al-Youm Sabea newspaper that Regeni died in a car accident, denying signs of torture despite the Italian ambassador having confirmed the signs of torture after he viewed the body in the mortuary.
The Italian government further announced that it would not accept unclear information from Egyptian authorities in the investigation. “We won’t settle for purported truths, as we have said on the occasion of the two arrests initially linked to the death of Giulio Regeni,” insisted Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni in an interview published in La Repubblica newspaper on Monday. Paolo stressed that Italy seeks an expedient meeting out of justice.
Several Italian media outlets have reported repeated accusations that Egyptian security forces arrested, tortured, and then killed Regeni, seeking to ascertain information concerning labour unions and activists that he had collected in the course of his research. Italian media outlets supported their accusation by referring to numerous enforced disappearance and police brutality cases in Egypt criticised by local and international human rights advocators and organizations.
However, the Egyptian minister of interior Magdi Abdel Ghaffar denied the involvement of Egyptian security forces in Regeni’s death in a press conference on Monday. Abdel Ghaffar rejected all speculation published on media outlets criticising the Egyptian police and affirmed that “Egypt is treating Regeni’s case as if it were a case involving an Egyptian”.
Also on Monday, more than 4,600 academics from 90 countries signed an open letter demanding Egyptian authorities to cooperate with an independent and impartial investigation into the instances of enforced disappearances, cases of torture, and deaths the occur in detention centres that have occurred in January and February of 2016.
Regeni, 28, was reported missing on the fifth anniversary of the 25 January Revolution. He was last known to be travelling to downtown Cairo via the Behouth metro station. He was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and had come to Cairo as a visiting scholar at the American University in Cairo (AUC) to research Egyptian labour unions.
