Italy urged Egypt for help hours after student disappeared

While understanding the deep shock and sadness at the murder of the Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni, it was premature and short-sighted of the academics who wrote to you (Letters, 9 February) to prejudge the results of the official criminal investigation.

He had left his apartment with a plan to travel by subway to meet a friend in the city, but was never seen again.

That was nine days after he was reported missing on the anniversary of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Reports from local media say that Regeni’s body had been found naked from the waist down and that there were signs his body had been dragged along the ground. Police initially dismissed the death as a road accident. The Cairo prosecutor in charge of the case, though, spoke of knife wounds, cigarette burns and torture – what he described as a slow death.

A second autopsy in Italy shed further light into Mr Regeni’s death with details so shocking that interior minister Angelino Alfano told Sky TV that he struggled to catch his breath after reading the report. The ministry says these are isolated cases.

Italy waited nearly a week before going public with the case, prompting accusations that it prioritized business interests with Egypt – and hopes for a trade delegation headed to Cairo after Regeni disappeared – over the search for the student.

He added: ‘We briefly talked on the day of his disappearance, about two hours earlier.

On Jan 31, the Italian foreign ministry in an unusually candid statement, called on Egypt to put “maximum effort” into finding Regeni, after saying the young man “mysteriously disappeared”.

In closing, the spokesman expressed his condolences to Regeni’s family and loved ones, assuring them that what happened to Regeni is as unacceptable to the people of Egypt as it is to all those who knew and loved him.

For years, rights groups have accused Egyptian police of regularly torturing detainees.

Nevertheless, more than 4,600 academics from all over the world have since signed an open letter calling for Egyptian authorities to look into their alleged widespread use of arbitrary arrests and violence, noting that “the Egyptian interior and defence ministries routinely practise the same kinds of torture that Giulio suffered against hundreds of Egyptian citizens each year”.

Italian police were dispatched to Cairo on Saturday and have started working with their Egyptian counterparts on the case.