Giulio quickly adapted to life in Egypt after his arrival in mid-September. In two months, a few words of Arabic and even fewer friends had grown into a strong network of relationships, from university professors to street sellers on Ahmed Hilmi Street, and in Heliopolis and Dar al-Salam.

The distance between 8 Yanbaa Street — off al-Ansari Street, which is off Tahrir Street — to the Buhouth metro stop is about 400 meters. Giulio usually walked them in an average of about five minutes, reaching the metro that would normally take him into the world of Cairo. Giulio walked these 400 meters, or less, on January 25, 2016, the fifth anniversary of the revolution — the last day he was seen alive — before suddenly disappearing. According to prosecutors, cellphone network towers detected his last known movements in these 400 meters between 7:45 and 8:31 p.m.

The memorial page for Giulio on the Cambridge University website provides more details about the researcher. His friends call him smart, a lover of knowledge, cooperative, and brave. The page reveals that this was not Giulio’s first time in Cairo. He was here for a longer period in 2012, working as a researcher for the UN Industrial Development Organizations (UNIDO), having earned a BA in Arabic and political science from Leeds University. He then returned to Europe to work at Oxford Analytica for nearly a year, before returning to Cambridge in 2014 to complete his PhD in economic and social development in the Middle East. He was also a visiting scholar at the American University in Cairo (AUC) from September 2015 to March 2016 and planned to return to his university afterward.

But someone interfered with his plans.

Hoda Kamel, the coordinator for labor issues at the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, greets you with a sweet smile before quickly disappearing among the unionists, activists, and paperwork. She and her smile return but before she can answer your first question, a visitor at the center inquires about something and she disappears again. Her constant activity and dense network of relationships is why Dr. Rabab al-Mahdi, Giulio’s research advisor at AUC, suggested she could be of assistance to Giulio. “We met about six times,” Kamel says. “The first meeting was in October at the Center’s office, to give him an idea of the experiences of the independent unions.” The last meeting “was on January 19. He had questions about the minimum wage in Egypt, when it went into effect and who benefitted.”

According to academic sources who requested anonymity, Giulio’s first stay in Egypt in 2012 ended after the hysteria about foreign spies. Government television aired public service announcements warning of foreign spies, and as news spread of citizens detaining foreigners they suspected of being spies, “leaving Egypt seemed the most logical next step,” the source said.

Giulio was aware of the situation. Hoda Kamel describes him: “He did not look provocative. He did not grow his hair out or walk around wearing shorts on the street. He wore no accessories on his wrist or rings on his fingers. His hair was always neat and his clothes were very conventional. He carried a jacket and a notebook.” According to other sources close to Giulio, the first time he became nervous during his second stay in Egypt was after his photo was taken at the independent union meeting on December 11, 2015. The anxiety seemed to have some effect on his behavior. Walking downtown to the paper’s office, Amr Asaad tells us, “Giulio left on December 20 to spend the Christmas break in Europe. He came back on January 2. A week before the anniversary of the revolution, he told me he would not leave his house for a week starting on January 18, except for necessities”.

“He understood that the security situation on the anniversary of the revolution was not good.”

No one has the full story of what happened as the sun set on January 25. Giulio had planned to go out and meet an Italian friend, Gennaro, a professor at the British University in Egypt, in Bab al-Louq Square. From there, they would go together to see Hassanein Kishk, a professor of sociology and expert at the National Center for Sociological and Criminological Research. Gennaro expresses regret to their common friends: “Why did we decide to meet in Tahrir? We should have met at Giulio’s place, it is closer to Hassnein Kishk’s house.” The Giza Incidents chief prosecutor, Ahmed Nagi, says that the last signal from Giulio’s phone cam from the street between his home and the metro, between 7:45 and 8:31 pm.

Amr Asaad remembers their last phone contact: “I received a message from him at 6:30 pm, asking if there were any plans, for Hassanein Kishk. He was asking about plans to celebrate his birthday.” Giulio had just turned 28 days before. He then called Genaro at 7:40 pm to tell him he was leaving the house and heading to the metro. He also sent a Skype message to his girlfriend around that time, telling her he was getting ready to go out. (Al-Masry al-Youm attempted to contact his girlfriend, but she refused to speak to us at his family’s request.) Starting at 8:31 pm, his calls went straight to voicemail indicating to callers that his phone was perhaps turned off.

Twenty-five minutes passed after Giulio’s call to Gennaro and Giulio had still not arrived. Gennaro tried to phone him between 8:18 and 8:31, but there was no answer, and then the phone was turned off. According to his statement to the prosecution, he headed to the home of Hassanein Kishk. About three hours later, he began to worry about his missing friend, so he called Noura Fathi, one of Giulio’s oldest friends in Egypt, going back to Cambridge. She called Giulio at home. Gennaro knew then that Giulo was not at home and not at the birthday party. A mutual friend, lawyer Malek Adly, went to the Qasr al-Nil and Abdin police stations and sent a colleague to the Doqqi station. But Giulio had disappeared without a trace.

On the morning of the next day, Rabab al-Mahdi, the political science professor at AUC, woke up at home, near the center of the city, to a panicked phone call. Giulio’s friend told her he had disappeared. “From the first moment, I knew that his disappearance was not voluntary,” she said. She contacted the AUC administration and the Italian embassy, urging them to take action. “Everything pointed to that — the state’s hysteria about everything it does not know, the forced disappearances, the anniversary of the revolution with all the regime’s panic, his turned-off telephone. They were all clear signs. The disappearance was not an accident. We had to move fast.”

On the other side of the Nile in Maadi, Amr Asaad woke up to more than sixty missed calls and messages from Gennaro, his and Giulio’s mutual friend. “There was terror in his messages. He was afraid, he did not know what to do.” Genaro went to the Qasr al-Nil police station, while Noura and Giulio’s roommate went to the Doqqi station. Police reports were filed.

Later, Giulio’s friends began to quietly publicize his disappearance. The news spread quickly, especially among his Egyptian friends, despite the resistance of several of his Italian friends. Asaad recalls, “Gennaro was afraid to let it be known widely that Giulio had disappeared. He thought that not spreading the news would help him, but we knew that what could help him was announcing it and exerting pressure.”

A few days later, a hashtag began to circulate: #where_is_giulio, accompanied by a picture of Giulio smiling, sporting a neat beard and an olive-green sweater with the collar of a light-colored shirt showing underneath. The ambassador was annoyed by what sources close to him called the “calmness of the Egyptian police.” Giulio’s friends upped the pressure. Perhaps a gang had abducted him to extract money? A security source at AUC told Rabab al-Mahdi, “As long as his family and friends have received no ransom demand, that scenario can be dismissed.” Other scenarios began to emerge. A member of the investigating team at the Doqqi police station tells one witness in late January, “If a person were held at the Agouza station just a few meters from Doqqi, we would not know anything about it.”

In the early morning hours, microbus driver Ahmed Khaled’s day seemed like any other. He filled his seats and set off on his routine trip on the Cairo-Alexandria desert road. But a bad front tire forced him to pull over and unload his passengers on the pavement separating the tunnel leading to Rimaya Square and the road that slowly rises and curves to the right toward the desert around the Pyramids. Before he finished the tire-change, according to his statement to the Public Prosecution, several passengers were urinating in the space between the tunnel and the road, and that is when they found the body of a young man.

At first glance, his features did not suggest he was a foreigner. The passengers notified the bus driver, who notified the bus owner, who notified a policeman, who in turn notified the Giza Incidents Prosecution, specifically Hossam Nassar, the senior prosecutor at that bureau. Nassar went and surveyed the scene and released a routine news item about a body found on the side of the road. Journalists picked up the story at about 11:00 am on February 3 and published the item as follows: “The South Giza Incidents Prosecution ordered today, Wednesday, investigations by the security apparatus to determine the circumstances surrounding the finding of an unidentified body of a young man of [the age of] about thirty. He is thought to have died under torture, and the prosecution allowed an autopsy to determine the cause of death. The prosecution also permitted an analysis of the DNA of the deceased and the publication of the body’s description in an attempt to identify it.”

At roughly this same time, preparations were almost complete for the meeting between President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and the Italian minister of economic development, along with representatives of 37 major Italian enterprises. Khaled Abu-Bakr, the chair of the Egyptian-Italian Business Council, said, “The Egyptian side had prepared numerous investment projects to propose to the Italians, especially in the sectors of renewable energy, petroleum, gas, petrochemicals, process industries, and the environment.” But the winds did not bear good news.

After a morning meeting with President al-Sisi, punctuated by one or more questions about the missing Giulio, Italian sources told al-Masry al-Youm, the meeting concluded at noon. Just a few hours later, at about 5:00 pm, the Italian ambassador, who chose not to speak to al-Masry al-Youm, received a phone call from a friend in the Egyptian government informing him that the Italian youth had been found dead, apparently after being tortured. “The ambassador tried to find out where the body was,” the source continued, “but all of his calls to the Ministry of Interior went unanswered, until late on the night of February 3, when an old friend told him that Giulio’s body was at the Zeinhom morgue.”

Inside the morgue, confusion reigned. Two doctors with the Forensic Medicine Authority were about to begin the autopsy after conducting a half-hour preliminary examination. But then they received orders to stop, according to a source inside the morgue who preferred to remain anonymous. They were told to wait for Dr. Hisham Adel-Hamid, the head of the authority, to supervise the drafting of the final report.

Sources close to Giulio who requested anonymity told al-Masry al-Youm that Giulio’s phone was turned on for a few minutes on the morning of January 26, the day following his disappearance. An incoming call went unanswered before the phone was again turned off. Al-Masry al-Youm took that piece of information, which could reveal Giulio’s whereabouts on the day that followed his disappearance, to the South Giza Incidents Prosecution and presented it to chief prosecutor Ahmed Nagi. He said he could neither confirm nor deny it.

We asked about the final coroner’s report. He cast a glance at the thick case file on his desk, in a blue folder marked in large black letters “homicide.” He lifted his head up, smiled, and refused to release any information contained in the report, which was issued on February 14. “Disclosing the details of the report will compound the difficulties of the case and reduce the chances of catching the perpetrators,” he said. But he did say that the report identified the time frame in which Giulio was tortured. A source inside in the Forensic Medicine Authority who saw the final report before it was turned over to the Public Prosecution fills us in on the details: “The young man was tortured for five separate, not continuous days…The torture was not ongoing. On some days of his 10-day disappearance, he was not assaulted.”

The chief prosecutor denied that Giulio had been tortured with electroshocks to his genital area, while the Italian ambassador told BBC, “I observed wounds, bruises, burns, and broken ribs. There is no doubt that the young man was severely beaten and tortured.” But the second autopsy carried out in Italy confirmed, according to the Italian interior minister, that Giulio had been subject to “inhumane, animal-like violence.” A source who had seen photos of the victim said, “His faced was bruised, his ears appeared to be split with a razor at the top, and his palms showed marks that seemed to be traces of restraints.”

At the same time and day of the week when Giulio’s body was thrown on the side of the road, we went to the last site of the crime scene. The road was packed in the early morning hours, and there were few pedestrians in sight. But a few guards sat around a fire and a teapot by a building overlooking the triangular space separating the tunnel that leads to Rimaya Square and the on- and off-ramp to the Pyramids desert road. There a few guards sat around a fire and a teapot. They initially refused to speak before pointing and saying, “They found him here.”

“No one saw a thing,” one of them said. “No one can see a thing unless he stops, parks his car, and gets up on the pavement.” Speaking with a rural accent, another one asked, “The foreigner they found — what was he doing?” A policeman standing in front of the chief prosecutor’s office asked the same question, but more heatedly, wondering, “What do they with all this research?!”

Hossam al-Mallahi, the head of the higher education missions and delegations sector, answered the question in a telephone interview with the paper: “Currently some 1,000 researchers reside in Egypt, affiliated with private and government universities.” He explains, “The research process is well known. Researchers provide content and major human contributions to the global academic movement.” Given al-Mallahi’s position, the statement is not unexpected. But other incidents — as when Marie Duboc, a labor researcher, was denied entry to Egypt in late 2011 when conducting research on Shebin al-Kom workers — suggests others are less understanding.

In an interview at al-Masry al-Youm’s offices, Mohammed Abdullah, the head of the Street Vendors Syndicate in western Cairo, was more understanding of Giulio’s work: “I met him more than ten times. I went with him to the Ahmed Hilmi station and we met the street vendors. We went to Heliopolis and met others.” In another interview Rabie Yamani, advisor for the syndicate, was even more understanding: “These are people who want to help us,” he said. “He tried to talk about union awareness, how we could help street vendors and raise their awareness of unions.”

Yamani shows us text messages he received from Giulio. In one message, they agree to meet on January 17 in Tahrir Square, before Giulio begged off due to circumstances beyond his control. Yamani sympathizes with Giulio and says others do, too: “All the street vendors who dealt with him feel pain and sadness. His only goal was to help us.”

In contrast, Abdullah seems apathetic. “Before Giulio left for his Christmas break, he approached me about applying for a workshop for us with a British organization. Since then, I felt wary. I started to keep away from him and I did not feel comfortable with him.” This contradicts Amr Asaad’s version of the story. He had said that before Giulio traveled, he wanted to secure a grant for the street vendors union, but after he returned, he ignored it. When Asaad asked, Giulio said he was annoyed by one of the officials with the union, feeling that he was trying to take advantage of him.

Mohammed Abdullah kept Giulio at arm’s length, he said, after he began to feel apprehensive, but he denies reporting his concerns about the researcher to any security agency. “If we see a corpse, we turn our backs,” he said. “Giulio always talked with all the street vendors. Maybe they got the same feeling. I always found him at the Ahmed Hilmi market surrounded by lots of vendors, talking and laughing with them, and half the vendors are police informants.”

This does not match the story from the Azbakiya and Shubra police stations. The stations share administrative supervision of the market, which has a permanent security deployment composed an officer, a junior policeman, and two recruits who are responsible for monitoring the area. Colonel Mamdouh Samir, the Shubra station chief, strenuously denies that Giulio visited the market. “Officers are always present there,” he said. “If he had gone to the market, I would have been personally informed.” General Bassem al-Shaarawi, the chief of the Azbakiya station, says virtually the same thing: “He did not come to the market or the station. We have cameras everywhere. For him to enter the station and us to conceal his entrance would be impossible.”

Three weeks worth of investigations have neither confirmed nor refuted any specific scenario. Asked about the most likely scenario, Ahmed Nagi, the chief prosecutor, says quickly, “All possibilities are on the table. We have not been able to rule out any scenario so far.” We press him, asking when the case would be closed and the perpetrator listed as unknown. “We will not close the case until hearing all witnesses,” he answers swiftly. “Even if it were closed and new evidence came to light, it would be immediately reopened.”

At a memorial ceremony for Giulio Regeni organized by the AUC political science department on Wednesday, Ferial Ghazoul, the chair of the department of English and comparative literature, read an excerpt from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Mural” for Giulio:

Are they repeating the story? What is the beginning?
What is the end?
None of the dead remain to tell me the truth…
Wait for me, death, away from the land,
Wait for me in your country, while I finish
A fleeting conversation with what is left of my life.

(Published in English at Jadaliyya on March 7, 2016. This article originally appeared in Arabic in Al-Masry Al-Youm)

The latest on the case

by the Verità per Giulio reporting team

March 25, 2016
Belongings allegedly belonging to Giulio are found

The Egyptian interior ministry said in a statement that Regeni’s passport was found in the home of the sister of one of the deceased alleged gang members, named as Tarek Saad Abdel Fatah, 34.

Over the weekend, four relatives of the alleged gang leader, Tarek Abdel Fattah, were arrested. His wife, sister and two brothers are accused of aiding and abetting for covering up a crime and hiding stolen goods. The evidence against them, according to Egyptian officials, are Regeni’s personal effects, found in the sister’s home.

But she and Abdel Fattah’s wife stated during questioning that the gang never killed Regeni, according to the Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm. The wife said the red bag had been delivered to her husband a few days prior to his death “from a friend.”

The famous red bag — in which investigators found Regeni’s identification documents, sunglasses, hashish, a women’s handbag, a cell phone and credit card — was not Regeni’s, according to his friends interviewed by El Tahrir. They said they’ve never seen the bag or the sunglasses, and the hashish couldn’t have been his, either: Regeni didn’t smoke.

Italian investigators in Cairo pointed to inconsistencies in Egypt’s latest version of what happened to Regeni. First, kidnappers would be unlikely to hold on to compromising evidence such as a victim’s passport for months after the victim’s death. Second, kidnappers would be unlikely to torture a victim over the course of a week — as Regeni was — if their only purpose was to obtain a ransom.

Third, it is not credible that an entire gang of alleged kidnappers was killed by police, thereby preventing any possibility of getting corroborating statements from any of them. Rome Chief Prosecutor Giuseppe Pignatone said the new evidence supplied by Egyptian authorities didn’t prove anything.

March 29, 2016
Giulio's family demands justice

The parents of Italian graduate student Giulio Regeni, who was tortured and killed in Cairo, demanded a tough response from Rome if Egypt fails to uncover the truth behind their son’s murder.

Giulio’s mother, Paola Regeni, said she might release a photograph of her son’s body to show the world what had happened to him in Egypt if his murderers were not revealed.

“I only recognized him because of the tip of his nose. As for everything else, it was no longer him,” she said in the first news conference the family has given since Giulio’s battered body was found in a roadside ditch on Feb. 3.

The head of parliament’s human rights committee, Luigi Manconi, who also took part in the news conference, said the government should recall Italy’s ambassador to Cairo and declare Egypt unsafe for visitors if the investigation went nowhere.

“Relations should not be broken, but they should face a particularly significant revision,” said Manconi, a member of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party. Giulio Regeni’s father, Claudio, said he supported this call.

Last week, Egyptian police said they had discovered Regeni’s bag and passport following a shootout with a criminal gang. Italian officials dismissed the story and Regeni’s family said it was clear Giulio had not been killed for criminal gain.

The family lawyer, Alessandra Ballerini, said the Italian autopsy showed that Regeni was alive until Feb. 1 or 2 and that there had never been a ransom bid or money stolen from his bank account in the days after his disappearance.

“Whatever the truth, it is clearly very uncomfortable for the Egyptian regime,” she said.

April 6, 2016
A new, anonymous source appears

An anonymous source claiming to be part of the Egyptian secret police has written to Rome daily La Repubblica accusing Egyptian authorities, including Sisi, of ordering Regeni’s abduction and revealing details of his torture, such as beatings on the soles of his feet, that have never before been made public but were known to Italian prosecutors, the Rome daily reported Wednesday.

And Cairo sources of Turin daily La Stampa said that the person Egypt is willing to “sacrifice” to put an end to the controversy over its perceived stonewalling is General Khaled Shalabi, the high-ranking national-security official entrusted with the Regeni case.

Shalabi, condemned by an Alexandria court in 2003 for having tortured to death an Egyptian man and falsified police reports, was restored to his position after the sentence was suspended.

An Egyptian delegation of prosecutors and police officials is set to arrive in Rome late Wednesday for meetings Thursday and Friday with Rome prosecutors investigating the Cairo torture and death of Italian student Giulio Regeni.

April 7, 2016
Egyptian investigators meet with their counterparts in Italy

Italian investigators into the Cairo torture and murder of student Giulio Regeni gave their Egyptian colleagues information on what they had found on his computer as well as what was learned in an autopsy performed in Italy after a first one in Egypt, sources said after the first of two meetings between the two groups in Rome.

According to judicial sources, the exact content of the meeting is thus far confidential, press agency Ansa reported.

The Egyptian delegation informed their Rome counterparts on their activity prior to March 14, the day on which Prosecutor Giuseppe Pignatone and Assistant Prosecutor Sergio Colaiocco went to Cairo for their first meeting with local judicial authorities. The second of the two Rome meetings will take place on Friday.

The dossier that a delegation of Egyptian investigators brought for meetings with their Italian counterparts contains video footage and record of telephone calls made by Regeni, among other things, Egyptian daily Al Masry Al Youm reported Thursday, citing judicial sources. The newspaper said the dossier featured “recordings of surveillance video cameras,” a “register of calls from his mobile telephone,” “the coroner’s report on the autopsy” and “the testimony of officials and friends of the victim.”

It said it was “a complete dossier on the case, containing all the relationships and inquiries. Implicitly referring to the sister and wife of the head of an alleged kidnapping gang killed by police last month, Al Masry Al Youm added that among the papers were “the confessions of the accused among whom [Regeni’s] personal effects were found.”

There was also evidence about the alleged other non-Egyptian victims of the supposed kidnapping gang, the paper said.

April 8
Italy recalls its ambassador from Egypt

Italy says it is recalling its ambassador from Cairo for urgent consultations as Rome presses to learn the “truth” about Regeni's torture and killing in Egypt.

Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni made the decision after two days of meetings in Rome between visiting Egyptian investigators and Italian prosecutors and police regarding Regeni's death.

The Foreign Ministry said it had recalled Ambassador Maurizio Massari for “an urgent evaluation” of what steps to take to “ascertain the truth about the barbaric murder of Giulio Regeni,” according to a statement.

Local media reported that Italian authorities felt Egypt wasn't moving fast enough in the investigation.