Italian Student’s Brutal Killing May Be Issue in Egypt-U.S. Meetings

[umbertino]

By DECLAN WALSH

 

FEB. 7, 2016

 

 

CAIRO — Diplomatic meetings in Cairo and Washington this week are likely to further focus international attention on the death of an Italian graduate student whose badly beaten body was found in Cairo last week.

 

A visit by the Egyptian foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, to Washington and a trip to Cairo by Sarah B. Sewall, the State Department’s top official for human rights, come amid mounting pressure by Italy for Egypt to find the killers of Giulio Regeni, 28, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University who had come to Cairo to study informal labor movements.

 

The Italian interior minister, Angelino Alfano, citing an autopsy carried out after the body arrived in Italy on Saturday, said Mr. Regeni had suffered “inhuman, animal-like, unacceptable violence” before his death. A person close to Mr. Regeni’s family said the autopsy showed that he had died from a fracture of his cervical vertebra, most likely caused by a violent blow to the neck.

 

The Egyptian government, apparently alarmed by the angry reaction to Mr. Regeni’s death, has allowed Italian investigators to participate in the investigation into the killing, and officials have repeatedly emphasized their intention to cooperate with Italy.

 

Italian officials have issued demands for “the truth” about what happened to Mr. Regeni, and while they have avoided making public accusations against Egypt, some have privately blamed the Egyptian security forces for his death.

 

The meetings between Egyptian and American officials this week are likely to include discussion of Mr. Regeni’s case, seen by some in Egypt and abroad as another alarming sign of abuse by the security forces in a country where arbitrary detention and torture have become increasingly common, according to human rights monitors.

 

In Washington, Mr. Shoukry is scheduled to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry, the president’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, and various congressional leaders, the Egyptian foreign ministry said in a statement.

 

In Cairo, Ms. Sewall, the undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy, and human rights, was to meet with Egyptian government officials. In a statement, Ms. Sewell, who previously headed the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said she looked forward to “learning more about the challenges facing Egypt and the progress the country has made in addressing them.”

 

American officials have previously criticized Egypt’s human rights record under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, most recently during a visit to Cairo by Mr. Kerry in August. Still, the Obama administration continues to give $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Egypt — a reflection, in part, of the country’s perceived strategic importance as a bulwark against Islamic State militants in the region, particularly in Libya.

 

Italy, too, has strong ties with Egypt: Italy was the first Western country to welcome Mr. Sisi after the ouster in 2013 of the democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi; the two countries cooperate in the fight against Islamic militants; and they are coordinating over the discovery last summer of a gas field off the Egyptian coast by the Italian energy giant Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi. Even so, the stark details of Mr. Regeni’s death have plunged that relationship into crisis.

On Sunday, the Italian ambassador to Egypt said that Mr. Regeni’s body had “clear, unequivocal marks of violence, beating and torture.”

 

The ambassador, Maurizio Massari, who was the first Italian to see Mr. Regeni’s body, said in a television interview that Egyptian officials were initially of little help when Mr. Regeni went missing on Jan. 25 after leaving his apartment to see a friend in downtown Cairo.

 

But then on Wednesday, hours after Italian officials appealed to Mr. Sisi in person and before a visit by an Italian trade delegation, Mr. Regeni’s body was discovered. “I think that Mr. Sisi’s intervention managed to move the Egyptian government machine a bit, and make the body come out,” Mr. Massari said.

 

Mr. Regeni had already been dead for three or four days before his body was found, according to the findings of the autopsy, Italian news outlets reported on Sunday.

 

Some observers have questioned how effective the Italian investigators will be when, to many Italians, the prime suspects in the case appear to be members of the same Egyptian security forces with whom they will be working.

 

Mr. Massari said the extent of the Italian team’s collaboration with Egypt would become clear “in a few weeks, maximum.”

 

Dozens of Egyptians, including Mr. Regeni’s friends and political activists, gathered outside the Italian Embassy in Cairo on Saturday to lay flowers and light candles.

 

“The least we can do is stand here and say that we consider him to be one of us,” one friend, Sally Toma, told The Associated Press. “Unfortunately, he died the same way Egyptians die every day.”

 

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome, and Merna Thomas from Cairo.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/world/middleeast/egypt-italy-giulio-regeni-cairo.html?_r=0