APNewsBreak: Body of Italian student found outside Cairo

The body of missing Italian student, Giulio Regeni, was found partially burned on the side of a road outside the capital city of Egypt on Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.

His body was found dumped next to a road and has been taken to a Cairo morgue, a morgue worker and security officials said.

Mr Regeni was found naked from the waist down and seemed to have endured a “slow death”, Mr Nagi included.

The leading Egyptian human rights lawyer Mohamed Sobhy wrote on Facebook that “a remarkable number of national security personnel” had gathered at the Zeinhom morgue in Cairo and that he had not been allowed to see Mr Regeni’s body.

The Italian embassy had been working closely with the Egyptian authorities to locate Mr Regeni, who was studying Egypt’s trade unions in Cairo as part of his Cambridge doctorate.

The 2011 rebellion brought the Islamist Mohammed Morsi to power, who was in turn ousted by the army, led by the current president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry has told his Italian counterpart Paolo Gentiloni that Egypt is “keen” to “fully cooperate” with Italy in the investigation into the mysterious death of PhD student Giulio Regeni.

“So I’m confident that the Egyptian authorities will cooperate with us to understand what happened, to establish the truth of what happened”, Gentiloni said. “But what we know is that it is an accident”, Azmi said.

The Egyptian ambassador in Rome was summoned to the foreign ministry to discuss the death.

The foreign ministry also asked for Regeni’s corpse to be repatriated to Italy as soon as possible.

Also on Thursday, one of Regenis’ Egyptian friends told Egyptian paper Al Ahram that the post-doctoral student was seeking contacts with labor activists so he could interview them. As in other cases, authorities clamped a media gag order to prevent reporting on the investigation.

“It has become increasingly hard and risky to conduct research”, said Amy Austin Holmes, head of the Sociology unit at the American University in Cairo.

He said the group has documented 35 disappearances so far in 2016, including at least two of whom died. Many have disappeared since 2013.