Egypt’s State Information Service (SIS) on Sunday refused to charge the police officers suspected by the Italian prosecution of killing the Italian Cambridge University student Giulio Regeni, raising questions over his entering the country with a tourist visa.
A judicial source said that during a meeting between the Egyptian and Italian public prosecutors, “the Italian side renewed their request to the Egyptian public prosecutor to approve the inclusion of a number of Egyptian policemen on its register of suspects in Italy,” the SIS said in a statement on Sunday.
The SIS quoted a judicial source saying “the investigations carried out by the public prosecution in both Egypt and Italy did not produce ‘solid’ indictments or even doubts as to the requirements of the Italian law itself to add suspects in this record.”
The source also mentioned that “both sides have raised questions on the nature of the visa of the Italian student obtained since he entered Egypt which was a tourist visa, not a student one.” He added “the Italian prosecution promised to carry out a thorough investigation into the matter whose results will be presented at an upcoming meeting between both sides.”
On Friday, the Italian prosecution named several police officers of Egypt’s national state security as potential suspects of the murder of Regeni.
The 28-year-old PhD student was found dead on the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road in January 2016. He was conducting a research on the nature of political and economic developments in Egypt and particularly on labour unions.
