Minister of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Ahmed Abou Zaid told Daily News Egypt that statements coming from Italian TV over Giulio Regeni’s case are unofficial.
Privately-owned Italian TV channel La7 said on Thursday that an examination of recorded phone calls indicated that murdered Italian researcher Regeni was followed by Egyptian police officers, citing anonymous Egyptian sources.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not a main party in the issue, and hence cannot verify or debunk the validity of those reported claims,” Abou Zaid said, noting that the investigative authorities in Egypt and Italy are the only official sources to rely on in Regeni’s case.
The Rome-based channel claimed that nine recordings were examined, and the results indicated that Regeni was allegedly followed into a metro station by five police officers on 25 January 2016─the day he disappeared.
The Egyptian government had repeatedly asserted that the Italian researcher was neither wanted nor followed by security forces, and that he was not detained in any police facility.
Regeni, who had just turned 28, was a PhD candidate 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). He was reported missing on the fifth anniversary of the 25 January Revolution.
