Giulio Regeni (Al Jazeera - Archive)

A prosecutor before a court in Rome examining the case of Italian Giulio Regeni, who was found dead in Egypt nearly 8 years ago, said that the Egyptian police arrested Regeni, believing him to be a British spy, and transferred him to a security headquarters, where he was tortured and killed.

Italy accuses four Egyptian security personnel of kidnapping and killing Regeni, a graduate student at the British University of Cambridge, in Cairo in 2016.

The four men are being tried in absentia and have not responded publicly to the accusations, according to Reuters, which indicated that the Egyptian authorities have consistently denied any state involvement in Regeni’s disappearance and death.

“The general picture that has emerged is that of a network that the defendants slowly tightened around Regeni between September 2015 and January 25, 2016,” prosecutor Sergio Colaiocco said in the second session of the trial.

Regeni was in Cairo to research independent unions in Egypt for his doctoral thesis and befriended people who were secretly reporting to local security forces.

“Because of this activity, the defendants were wrongly convinced that Regeni was an English spy, sent to provide funding to unions close to the Muslim Brotherhood,” Colaiocco said.

The prosecutor said that Regeni was subjected to “horrific torture” over the course of a week and then was deliberately killed, adding that the details of his suffering would be revealed at a later hearing.

The prosecution is calling for a total of 73 people to testify, including 27 who live in Egypt.

Colaiocco admitted that Italy needs the cooperation of the Egyptian police to send memos to this group telling them that they must testify.

contrast

Reuters says that it is not clear whether the prosecution's case will be completely undermined if the Egyptian witnesses refrain from testifying, noting that initially, Italian and Egyptian prosecutors participated in the investigation of the case, but they reached different conclusions.

Egypt blamed a group of gangsters for the murder after initially indicating that Regeni died in a road accident or in the circumstances of a sexual assault.

The Regeni case caused tension in diplomatic relations between Italy and Egypt, but in evidence of the return of relations to normal, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni went to Cairo on Sunday as part of a European delegation that signed a “strategic partnership” worth billions of euros with Egypt.

The Democratic Party, Italy's main center-left opposition party, denounced the visit.

Party leader Ellie Shlein said, "We will not conclude deals with regimes like the regime in Egypt, which for years protected the killers of Giulio Regeni," she said.

Source: Reuters