Mother of Italian student murdered in Egypt tells of having to identify body

The mother of an Italian student who was tortured to death in Egypt has told Italy’s parliament she only recognised the tip of her son’s nose when identifying his body.

Amid increasing anger over Cairo’s handling of the investigation into the murder of 28-year-old Giulio Regeni, Egyptian police are now expected to hand over key evidence to their Italian counterparts on 5 April.

Luigi Manconi, president of the human rights commission in the Italian senate, said that if Cairo failed to do so, Italy should consider recalling its ambassador toEgypt for consultation. Italy’s interior minister, Angelino Alfano, said on Sunday that Egypt had agreed to extend the investigation after pressure from Rome. Last week the Italian government questioned Cairo’s claim that it had identified a criminal gang linked to Regeni’s murder, after killing four gang members and finding the Cambridge University graduate student’s passport in one of the their apartments.

Egyptian police said they believed Regeni had fallen victim to the gang, which had hoped to force him to empty his bank account. Italian media and western diplomatic sources in Cairo have voiced suspicions that Egyptian security services were behind the murder of Regeni, whose mutilated body was discovered nine days after he disappeared on 25 January.

“I won’t tell you what they had done to him,” said Regeni’s mother, Paola, on Tuesday. “I recognised him just by the tip of his nose. The rest of him was no longer Giulio.”

She said she had taken a photograph of his battered body and was prepared to publish it if Cairo continued to refuse to share the findings of its investigation with the Italian police.

“What torments me is the thought that, before the first blow even fell, he knew that a door had closed forever. He had all the intelligence and culture to know what was about to happen to him,” she said. “On Giulio’s face I saw all the ills of the world. We have not faced such torture since the anti-Fascist era.”

Regeni had been researching labour movements in Egypt, a sensitive topic, and had written articles critical of the government under a pen name.

Prosecutors in Cairo on Saturday ordered the detention of four people over his murder, all of them closely related to the leader of the gang who was killed in the shootout with police.

Italy has so far rejected each of the vastly contradictory accounts Egypt has put forward, including allegations early on that the student had been working as a spy – an accusation his mother furiously denied.

The family’s lawyer, Alessandra Ballerini, said Egyptian investigators “must bring us everything that’s missing, including the phone records and data collected from the cell sites in the area and the security video footage from near the metro where he disappeared, and the area in which his body was found”.

Regeni’s mother said: “We don’t even know what Giulio was wearing when his body was discovered.” She added athat the family wanted further information not only on the gang which had his passport, but on how the gang could have acquired it.

Manconi said that if the information was not handed over, Italy’s foreign ministry “should declare Egypt an unsafe country, which would without a doubt have a not insignificant effect on the numbers of tourists” there.