AFTER Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian student at Cambridge University, disappeared in Cairo on January 25th, someone pulled out his finger and toenails, burned him with a cigarette and beat him to death. His tortured, half-naked body was found nine days later on the side of a desert road. The Italian autopsy on Mr Regeni “confronted us with something inhuman, something animal”, said Angelino Alfano, Italy’s interior minister.
Cairo was swarming with police on January 25th, the fifth anniversary of the uprising against Hosni Mubarak, the ousted dictator. In its effort to avoid a repeat, the current government, led by the strongman Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, has gained a reputation for brutality. So suspicions are growing that Egypt’s security services had a role in the death of Mr Regeni, whose research on labour movements in Egypt and occasional writing for Il Manifesto, a left-wing Italian newspaper, may have put him in contact with groups considered enemies of the state, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
Such talk is “unacceptable”, said Magdi Abdel-Ghaffar, Egypt’s interior minister, in a rare press conference. He denies...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1U82wRv
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