Office Number 13

Giulio Regeni's life was violently put to an end after days of interminable mistreatment and torture inflicted in a room of horrors. "Office 13", on the second story of a small Fifties-style villa in the center of Cairo. An "Olympic Garage" where foreign citizens were subjected to "special treatments", if they were suspected of "subversive activities". The building has its front entrance on Lazoughly Street, on the right bank of the Nile, inside the compound which houses the headquarters of the Interior Ministry of the Arab Republic of Egypt. Just two kilometers as the crow flies from the Italian embassy. And despite the embassy's repeated requests, for nine long days, from January 25^th until February 3, 2016, the Egyptian authorities had insisted persistently that they had no idea who that young Italian researcher was, much less where he might be. A Friulian from Fiumicello, he had arrived in Egypt in September 2015 to pursue research for his doctoral studies at Cambridge University.

The men responsible for Giulio's kidnapping, torture, and murder are four officers of the Egyptian National Security Agency: Tariq Sabir, born in 1963, a major general in the Egyptian National Security Agency; Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim, born in 1968, and colonel and director of inspections in the high security command at Wadi-Al-Jadid; Uhsam Helmy, born in 1968, colonel, previous on staff at the high command of the Egyptian National Security Agency; and Major Madgi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif, born in 1984, on duty at the National Security Agency. The Rome prosecutor's office requested they be brought to trial with a 94-page indictment signed by the chief prosecutor Michele Prestipino and assistant prosecutor Sergio Colaiocco. That document is the culmination of five years of investigations and it casts a bright light not only on the material involvement of the perpetrators in Regeni's murder, but also on the political responsibilities of Egypt's magistracy and other governmental institutions. The Egyptian government, in the past five years, has by and large knowingly and persistently hindered the search for the truth by altering and concealing sources of evidence, as well as constructing alternative theories of the case with only one objective: to throw investigators off the trail and to sow disinformation. An accusatory judicial document that has no precedents in the history of Italy's courts and which calls out the failings and shortcomings of the Arab Republic of Egypt. We shall now tell you the story of that investigation.
 

January 25, 2016

The day of January 25^th, in Cairo, is unlike any other day. And that January 25, 2016 was even more special than others. It was the fourth anniversary of the Tahrir Square revolt, with 25,000 protesters in the streets, giving the final shove that overturned the presidency of Hosni Mubarak. The city was under a strict curfew. Each and every street was under strict police and army control. The only people allowed to move freely around the city were the members of the security forces. "In short, it is unlikely", we read in the document by the prosecutor's office, "that anyone could have done anything that day without the National Security Agency, the intelligence services, or the army noticing".

At 11:20 AM, in the Dokki neighborhood, at number 8 on Shari Yanboo, in the apartment in which, back in September of the preceding year, Giulio had rented a room, he said goodbye to his flatmate and landlord, a young lawyer named El Sayaad, as he left that day for the office. The apartment was at that point inhabited only by a female German flatmate and Giulio, who was working on his computer.

"At 11:58 AM," the prosecutor's office points out, "Giulio did a Google search. Between 12:45 and 1:20 PM he read a number of Facebook posts. At 1:53 PM he texted his friend Gennaro Gervasio, a Neapolitan professor he'd met in Cairo: 'How are you? Any plans for today?' The professor wrote back at 2:46 PM: 'Hassanayn (editor's note: another Egyptian teacher, and a friend of both men) is feeling better, and if he's all right I'd like to go see him and celebrate his birthday. I'll keep you posted, after going out and about later today'. At 4 PM, Giulio was back on his computer, and worked on it for much of the rest of the afternoon. At 7 PM, he was still working on his laptop. He watched videos on YouTube and at 7:19 PM received a message from Gervasio: 'I'm going to take a look around, and then I'll let you know'. Giulio replied at 7:23 PM: 'Excellent. I'm in favor of saying hello to the professor if possible'. At 7:38, Gervasio called Giulio. He arranged for the two men to meet at 8 prosecutors on Bab El-Louq Square, in front of the Gad restaurant. At 7:41 PM, Giulio sent a last message on the Facebook chat with his girlfriend, a young Ukrainian woman: 'Going to see the professor with Gennaro. Hope yoga is going well. Let me know when you get home'".

At 7:59 PM, Professor Gervasio texted Regeni: "I've ventured as far as Tahrir. When you get here, give me a call and we'll meet in front of the KFC. I'm in the only café open nearby". Giulio never answered his phone again. In fact, his phone ended a call a last time, at 7:51 PM, on cell tower number 1326, inside the Dokki subway station. The prosecutors write: "Giulio Regeni finally decided to go out at 7:38 PM, when Professor Gervasio confirmed their appointment to meet. Therefore, this was a spur-of-the-moment decision, not one that was planned in advance. In logical terms, therefore, it must be one thing or another: we must either deduce that Regeni's capture by the National Security Agency was a chance occurrence and entirely divorced from any surveillance and stalking activities instituted as long as several days previous, which strikes us as unlikely and unreasonable, or else we must gather that Regeni was being monitored through technological means or even physically tailed. That the latter was the case is later confirmed by witness Gamma, who states that they were told directly by Major Sharif that Regeni was the subject of electronic surveillance and that as a result of that monitoring, the National Security Agency had learned that he intended to go to the Tahrir Square area".

That's right, "witness Gamma". This is one of the five key accounts, collected through the decisive efforts of the Regeni family's lawyer, Alessandra Ballerini. Those witness accounts have been dubbed with five different letters from the Greek alphabet, and they allowed the Rome prosecutor's office to follow an evidentiary thread back to Giulio's murderers, revealing their motives as well. The identities of the five witnesses are and remain, for now, the most zealously concealed secret of the entire investigation. The Egyptians, as recently as late November, had requested that information, only to be turned down. Therefore, as of this writing, the names and the stories of those five witnesses are known only to the chief prosecutor of Rome and his assistant. Their names haven't even been recorded in the digital file of the investigation made available to the various parties to the case (suspects and civil plaintiffs), where they appear as redacted. The lives of the five witnesses, all of them Egyptian citizens, and in at least one case, former members of the intelligence services, may hang from the preservation of that secrecy.
So let's leaf through it together, then, this alphabet of the truth.
 

Witness Alfa

The man was capable of revealing that the first one to betray Giulio Regeni was none other than the young lawyer, Mohamed El Sayyad, who had rented him a room in his apartment at number 8, Shari Yanboo. In fact, he tells the investigators that, two days prior to the kidnapping, on January 23, 2016, when speaking with El Sayyaad, the young lawyer had confided in him: "My Italian tenant created problems for me. The police came and searched his room, in my presence, and ordered me to tell him nothing about what had happened". His account confirmed that, during the Christmas holidays of 2015, when Giulio returned to Fiumicello for two weeks, the National Security Agency took advantage of his absence to rummage through his research in pursuit of confirmations of the paranoid hypothesis that had persuaded the agency to put the Italian under surveillance in the first place: that he was a spy, working either for the CIA or the English Antipode Foundation.

Witness Beta

This is a circumstance that is further confirmed by the second witness to whom the young lawyer El Sayyad had confided: "He told me that he had been contacted by the doorman of his apartment building, saying that he had been visited by an official from the National Security Agency, just before Christmas 2015, roughly in mid December. El Sayyad told me that he had been very strongly impressed by the fact that the official who contacted him did not belong to the local police but rather to the National Security Agency, and furthermore that he had warned both him and the doorman to maintain the most absolute secrecy about his interest in the matter. Sayyad told me that he had also exchanged telephone numbers with the official, and that they had spoken over the phone on several occasions before Christmas. He added that the official had come back to the apartment building, on at least one or two further occasions".

The National Security Agency operative who orders the surveillance of Giulio's home is named Mahmoud Nayem. He is an officer on duty with the National Security Agency division of Giza. His name also appears in the list of persons of interest drawn up by the Rome prosecutor's office, and he is the only one not included in the indictment. His exclusion from that list is tantamount to a decision not to proceed ("The evidence heretofore obtained do not allow us to ascertain with sufficient confidence that, given his status as a low-ranking officer, he played a conscious and active part in Giulio Regeni's kidnapping"). But what matters most is the fact that he's a member of Major Sharif's team, that is, the officer who, in November 2015, was ordered to conduct an investigation into Giulio Regeni after a complaint was lodged against him by the then-head of the street peddlers, Mohammed Abdallah, a man as desperate as he is unscrupulous, Giulio's contact for his impassioned research project into the independent labor unions of Egypt. After seeing his dreams dashed of getting his hands on the 10,000 pounds dangled as part of a research project underwritten by the Antipode Foundation, the labor leader decided to sell Giulio Regeni out as a spy.

Major Sharif is a crucial figure. He led the investigation on Giulio. He personally commanded the team that kidnapped him from the interior of the Dokki subway station, a few minutes before 8 PM on January 25, 2016. He personally conducted all the operations of interrogation and torture that would culminate with Giulio's murder. This, at least, the story that witnesses Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon tell.

Witness Gamma

Sharif, in August 2017, was in Nairobi, Kenya, for a meeting among functionaries of the various African intelligence services. In that circumstance, he thought it appropriate to boast to a Kenyan policeman about the work he'd done on a "young Italian" a mere year-and-a-half previously. Witness Gamma takes up the tale: "A few days after the elections of August 8, 2017, I was in a restaurant and a person was present who might have been an Egyptian. Afterwards, a person entered the restaurant whom I presumed to be a Kenyan, and a member of the Kenya security services. The two men, the Egyptian and the Kenyan, began discussing the situations that had developed in Nairobi in the realm of public order. Also, the protest movements in Kenya [...] When the Kenyan was done talking, the Arab started talking about an Italian university student, a doctoral candidate who had tried to incite a small group of people with a view to beginning another revolution. The Kenyan, in response to what the Arab was saying, stated that in his opinion as well, these people must be bad people.

The Arab continued his story, claiming that this Italian might well be a CIA agent, and also mentioned Mossad. The Egyptian went on, stating that they had discovered that he belonged to the Antipode Foundation, which was pushing for a revolution in Egypt".

At a certain point, according to the Egyptian's account, they had heard enough and they had gone ahead and started eavesdropping on him. They had heard from their electronic eavesdropping that he was going to attend a party in the Tahrir neighborhood and that, before he could reach a certain restaurant, they had detained him. The Egyptian spoke in the first person plural as he recounted these matters. They, in other words, the Egyptians, were very angry. And the Arab, using the first person singular, stated that he had hit the Italian. At this point, the Kenyan asked his Egyptian counterpart the name of the individual he was talking about. And the Egyptian replied, saying: Giulio Regeni. Before parting ways for the evening, they exchanged business cards. And the Kenyan spoke the name of Madgi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif, whereupon the Egyptian had confirmed that was his name".

Witness Delta

If the man who eavesdropped on that conversation between spies in a restaurant inevitably gives the sensation of a slippery piece of evidence, the same cannot be said of the statements made by two other witnesses. Let's admit it, the two decisive witnesses. Delta and Epsilon. The ones capable of ripping open the veil of secrecy that, for five years, protected the National Security Agency from the unthinkable truth about the last nine days of Giulio's young life. It was Delta and Epsilon in fact who told the tale of what happened when Giulio's cell phone, for one last time, before shutting off for good, hooked up just before 8 PM on the evening of January 25, 2016 with the cell tower located in the Dokki subway station.
Interviewed on November 8, 2019 by the Rome prosecutor's office, Witness Delta stated:

On the evening of January 25, 2016, I was in the Dokki police station, it could have been 8 PM or 9 PM, a person came [...] He must have been between 27 and 28 years old [...] He had a short beard [...] he wore a sweater, probably between blue and gray, if I am not remembering badly, with a shirt underneath [...] He expressed himself in Italian and asked for a lawyer [...] I'm sure it was Giulio Regeni. In the photos I saw on the internet he had a longish beard [...] I saw him arrive in the police station and, while walking down the hall, he asked to be allowed to speak to a lawyer or the Consulate [...] Next to him were four people in civilian clothes. One of these four people had a telephone in his hand".

Delta didn't know those four men. But he did distinctly hear the names of two of them. One was called "Mohamed" by the others. The other one, who seemed to be the chief and who conducted the operations, "was called Sharif". Major Sharif. The witness Delta also saw other things. "While Regeni continued to ask for a lawyer, another person who had been arrested that evening and who was in the police station, tried to help him. For that effort, he received an elbow to the face from one of the policemen, who told him that the young Italian man also spoke Arabic." Giulio in any case did not stay long at Dokki police station. "He was blindfolded," Delta goes on, "and hustled aboard a ?ahin model automobile," which corresponds to an Italian Fiat 131, and then conveyed to a place called Lazoughly. Lazoughly. Or hell on earth. The place where Giulio was killed.

Witness Epsilon

The last curtain separating the investigators from the truth fell on July 29^th of this year, a Wednesday. Sitting across from the prosecutor Sergio Colaiocco was a man - Witness Epsilon - who had worked for the National Security Agency for fifteen years. And not in just any old office of the agency. He had worked in "Lazoughly," the name of the unit that deals with "foreigners," with the assignment of persuading them to "talk". Lazoughly is a physical location, on the right bank of the Nile, in the heart of the city, just a little more than one kilometer from Tahrir Square, and two kilometers from the Italian embassy, as Epsilon explained. "It's a villa, a structure that dates back to the times of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and is located within the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior. It takes its name from the street on which it is located. The little villa is four stories tall, and the floor we're most interested in is the second floor, because that is where room number 13 is located".

"Room number 13" is an "investigative office," if we can use such a term to describe a torture chamber. "When some foreigner is detained on suspicion of plotting against national security, they are taken to that room," Epsilon said. And Giulio was no exception. Epsilon in fact came face to face with him "on the 28^th or 29^th of January". It had been three days since the kidnapping and the prisoner's treatment had already been going on for a while. "I saw Regeni in office 13 and there were also two officers and other agents, I only knew the two officers. Entering the office I noticed some iron chains with which they tied people up [...] Him - he was half naked in the upper part, and he bore signs of torture and was babbling words in his own language, he was delirious [...]

He was a thin boy, very thin. He was lying on the ground, with his face twisted backwards. I saw him handcuffed with handcuffs that forced him to the ground [...] I noticed signs of redness behind the back. I didn't recognize him right away, but five or six days later, when I saw the photos in the newspapers, I associated and realized it was him".

 

The Sweater and the Marks of Horror

The fact that witnesses Delta and Epsilon were telling the truth is a circumstance that finds macabre and yet formidable probatory confirmation in juridical terms. The prosecutors write: "Witness Delta reports in his statement a detail that was not known to anyone at the time his statement was taken, a detail that would subsequently be positively verified through the statements and photographic documents provided by Paola Deffendi, Giulio's mother. [...] Witness Delta states in fact that on the evening of January 25^th, in the Dokki police station, Giulio was wearing a sweater believed to be a color somewhere between blue and gray, with a shirt underneath it. Well, a sweater of that shade was in fact owned by Regeni and it was the only item not found by his parents among Giulio's effects in his room in Cairo. This is evidence that he was wearing it on the evening of January 25^th. For that matter, the description of the sweater also corresponds perfectly to the photographs supplied by Deffendi, depicting Regeni with a dappled sweater, of a color somewhere between gray and blue, a turtleneck, white on the interior, so that the interior of the neck might easily be mistaken for a white shirt".

Likewise, what Epsilon reports and the images of "Room 13" that remain impressed in his memories - Giulio half-naked on the floor, handcuffed, in the throes of a delirium caused by intolerable physical pain, his back ravaged by the marks of torture - match perfectly with what the autopsy undertaken in Rome by Professor Fineschi would document as the damage inflicted on that young man's body: fractures of the shoulder blades and wrists, the fingers, the femur, and the teeth, as well as extensive burns. "With a tragic convergence," the prosecutors write, "the autopsy indicates that the means of torture involved not only burns on the back, but also mechanisms of repeated impact of the body against hard surfaces, such as falls to the ground. And that means exactly the two types of torture compatible with the description offered by the witness Epsilon".

The Traitors

The officers of the Egyptian National Security Agency, the men who tortured and murdered Giulio Regeni, would find along their path other accomplices who facilitated their efforts to construct the slander that he was a spy, so as to transform the routine existence of his life as a doctoral student in Cairo into a cunning subversive plot. These were Judases whose names Giulio didn't live long enough to learn. But they were people in whom he had instinctively placed his trust. And they assisted the Egyptian security services in obtaining every last shred of information concerning him. His university research, his private life, his network of contacts. And their names, their deceitful actions, are now part of the indictment drawn up by the prosecutors.

Concerning the first Judas, the street vendor Mohamed Abdallah, we know plenty. He was supposed to help Giulio in his research project but, quite to the contrary, once he knew that the young man was not going to be able to shell out the 10,000 pounds from a project financed by the British Antipode Foundation, he simply turned Regeni over to the suspicions and surveillance of the National Security Agency. First and foremost, by reporting him as a Western spy attempting to arouse or, even worse, suborn "subversive activities". And then, on January 7, 2016, by agreeing to act as the lure in a trap constructed by the NSA with a video camera and concealed listening devices, meant to frame Giulio Regeni.

We have also already heard about the second Judas. This is the young lawyer Mohamed El Sayyad, owner of the apartment in Dokki where Giulio rented a room. He assisted in and was witness to the secret searches of Giulio's room during his time away at Christmas 2015. He went jogging with him and shared meals with him, but he was careful not even to alert him to the danger looming over him. Not even to warn him to be on the lookout or perhaps to flee Cairo. Unexpected and chilling, on the other hand, is the betrayal of Noura, a young Egyptian student who not only enjoyed Giulio's implicit trust, but to whom Giulio concealed nothing about his daily activities, his research work, and his life. The friendship and trust between Noura and Giulio were so powerful and deep that the two young people actually shared a file marked "Egypt" on Dropbox, where the young Italian researcher stored the Word files containing the questions that he asked the people he was interviewing for his doctoral thesis. Well, Giulio might not have known it, but on December 15, 2015, after Giulio left Egypt to spend the holidays in Italy, Noura emptied that file, removing all the documents that the National Security Agency had asked her to get, in order to bulk up the dossier they'd opened on Giulio.

The information that Noura gathered from Giulio, whatever it might consist of, even the most innocuous things, was immediately forwarded to Major Sharif of the National Security Agency though a form of triangulation designed to keep from arousing Giulio's suspicions. Noura, in fact, uses as a "dropbox" a certain Rami, a tour operator and personal friend of Major Sharif. The prosecutors determine this to be the case by the work they do on the telephone call records of all three: Noura, Giulio, Rami. "All telephone traffic between Noura and Giulio," they write, "is invariably preceded or followed by a contact between Noura and Rami. And then between Rami and Major Sharif". It is not clear why Noura made up her mind to betray Giulio. Only she and the Egyptian NSA know that. "On the one hand," the prosecutors point out, "we might venture the hypothesis that the young Egyptian woman had been the target of the interest of the National Security Agency, in the person of Rami," and that had therefore been blackmailed in one fashion or another. "Or, perhaps, conversely, that the NSA was making direct use of her".

Whatever the hypothesis, the outcome is all too well known. It was Noura who, up until the evening of January 25^th, lavished the Egyptian NSA, through Rami, with every sort of information that could be used to monitor Giulio's movements. It was she who, in one of their last dinners together, a few evenings before the kidnapping, invited Giulio to her home - and just to top it off, he wore to that dinner the same blue and gray sweater that he would wear on January 25^th, the sweater about which the witness Delta would later speak.

Abdallah, El Sayyad, Noura, and Rami, then. The Rome prosecutor's office gives these four people a special consideration which first establishes the part they played, but also secondarily depicts the tragic denouement. "The decision has been made," the prosecutors write, "not to proceed with inclusion of these four individuals among the list of the persons under indictment. Even though they were the source of invaluable information for the National Security Agency, they have not been shown to have played an active role in the events that occurred on the night January 25^th and the following days. In fact, what seems to emerge is the circumstance that, following the kidnapping, once they had realized the grim and grave consequences of their actions, they actually did their best (or at least some of them did) to work in Giulio Regeni's favor".
 

"A State Murder"

The facts laid out in the indictment drafted by the Rome prosecutor's office contain a crucial addendum. And this addendum, if we were to imagine the criminal responsibilities for Giulio's fate as a system of concentric circles, would therefore constitute the outermost circumference. The circle with the most unmistakable significance and potential political consequences. Because that circumference contains at once the narrower circle of the material responsibilities for the actual kidnapping and murder (the five officers of the Egyptian NSA) and the circle consisting of the role the "unintentional" facilitators (Giulio's four Judases), endowing this murder with the stigmata of a "state crime". We're talking about the responsibilities for the grim and determined activities of slow-walking, misinformation, and concealment of the truth that were carried on persistently for five long years by the Egyptian National Security Agency, the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior, and the Cairo general prosecutor's office. Stripped of its diplomatic lexicon as featured in the joint communiqués that paved the road to judicial cooperation between Rome and Cairo over the past five years, the actual facts and events tell the story of a country, Egypt, that over the past three years gave up even the appearance of any investigative activity that could come even somewhat close to the truth.

The prosecutors write: "From the very beginning of the collection of the first useful evidence for any understanding of what happened to Giulio Regeni, various actors undertook multiple attempts to derail the investigations, with the subtle intention of distracting investigators, with the active involvement of Egypt's public institutions".

The prosecutor's office's indictment lays them out with painstaking precision: the attempt to attribute a sexual motive to Giulio's murder; the attempt by the Egyptian medical examiners to assign the cause of death to a cerebral hemorrhage cause by whiplash in a car crash; the execution by firing squad of five Egyptian convicts accused - without a shred of evidence, given the results of their cell phones and telephone records - of being members of a criminal gang that supposedly kidnapped and murdered Giulio; the attempt to set up a supposed argument between Giulio and "another foreigner" in the vicinity of the Italian consulate on January 24, 2016, with the assistance of the false testimony of a certain Mohammed Al Fiqqi.

Pignatone's "Gift"

The then-chief prosecutor of Rome, Giuseppe Pignatone, had understood it all, and quite quickly. The documents of the prosecutor's office in fact record what happened on March 14, 2016 in Cairo when Pignatone and Colaiocco gained access to the offices del attorney general of the Arab Republic of Egypt. This was a point of the investigation when, to a discerning native of Palermo like Pignatone, the warning signs of disinformation were perfectly evident. To such an evident extent that the prosecutor decided to go ahead and call it out. In his fashion. With the cutting diplomacy of the Sicilians. According to whom, "the best word is the one you never say". On that 14^th of March, after listening in complete silence to the fairy tale about the argument between Giulio and some unknown person near the Italian consulate, Pignatone reached into his bag and pulled out an article, which he then proceeded to give to his interlocutor. It was an article from the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, entitled "Retrospective Study of Positive Physical Torture Cases in Cairo". "The lesions that our autopsy found on Giulio Regeni's body," he said, "were the same, according to the descriptions found in Egyptian medical and legal literature, typical of the local modus operandi of torturing those arrested".

This was an opening gambit that would allow the Rome prosecutor's office to bring home in those months of early 2016 what Egypt would refuse to give up from 2017 on. Telephone call records, cell phone accounts, and eyewitnesses accounts (albeit misleading ones) on the basis of which the formidable skills of the Carabinieri of the ROS (Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale, or Special Operations Group) and the state police of the SCO (Servizio Centrale Operativo, or Central Operations Service) were capable of reconstructing the events that led up to Giulio's kidnapping and murder. A circumstance that the prosecutor's office now put down in writing: "It was only in the period between September and December of 2016 that the Egyptian prosecutor's office would offer investigative evidence on its own initiative. From January 2017 onward, I will only share documents specifically requested by this office. For that reason, we must presume either that Egypt performed no independent investigation of its own after 2016 (except concerning the criminal gang), meaning it basically shut down its investigation on that date or else, perhaps, that it undertook investigations but never shared them, limiting itself strictly to handing over individual documents (eyewitness accounts and records) in response to letters rogatory from this office on a proxy basis".

Any accounting of the failed judicial cooperation between Egypt and Italy paints a rather pitiless picture. The prosecutors write:
"Of the 64 requests issued by this office to the Egyptian authorities through letters rogatory, only 25 received a response, while 39 remained unanswered. Of these latter requests, the ones that remained unanswered, no fewer than 13 would have been useful in identifying further individuals belonging to the National Security Agency who would appear to have been in some fashion involved in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Giulio Regeni. For that reason, since this office still has a pending criminal procedure against unnamed individuals, first undertaken in February 2016, if at some point judicial cooperation with the Egyptian prosecutor's office should eventually succeed in obtaining at least some of the information question, this office would thereupon proceed to undertake a complete reevaluation of the probatory material collected with a view to identifying the other individuals thus far remaining unidentified but nonetheless suspects of the crimes now under investigation".

The Subway Videos, the Discovery of the Body

For that matter, even when there has been cooperation, it turns out to have been manipulated. That was the case with the video taken by the closed-circuit television system in the Dokki subway station, where Giulio was kidnapped on the evening of January 25^th. On February 7^th of that year, Italian investigators (at that point present in Cairo with a combined-force team, of the state police SCO and the Carabinieri ROS) were informed by the NSA that the video recorded in the Cairo subway "had been reviewed and had supplied nothing useful to the investigation". In fact, two years later that circumstance would prove to useful in demonstrating that yet again, "our Egyptian friends" were either cutting corners or outright lying. After an extremely painstaking technical process to recover video footage, necessary to clean it up from a strange overwriting that took place because the footage had not been saved immediately, it would in fact turn out that there were gaps in that footage. To be exact, a gap that ran from 7:42 to 8:06 on that evening of January 25^th. The prosecutors wrote: "We are in the presence of a circumstance that, on the one hand, keeps us from diagnosing with any certainty the execution of scientific recovery operations on the hard drive to obtain useful footage, but on the other points to a further oddity". Not different from the conditions that would surround the discovery of Giulio's corpse on the morning of February 3, 2016.

We already know that on that day, at about 10:30 AM, along the Cairo-Alexandria desert road, on a line with the Hazem Hassan underpass, the driver of a minivan who was obliged to pull over to allow his passengers to urinate, noticed "a man's body in a seated position, half-naked on a reinforced concrete wall, used as a retaining wall for the road surface". This was Giulio. He had no identification papers on his person, he was wearing clothing - the notorious blue and gray sweater he was wearing when kidnapped and which had been noticed by witness Delta in the Dokki police station, and a black T-shirt wrapped around his neck - which would never be recovered nor handed over, blood-soaked. It would be useful, already in that long-ago February 2016, and all the more so, in the months and years that would follow, to further study the scene of the body's discovery. Because it could tell us a great deal. But no such study was ever undertaken. As the prosecutors wrote: "The actual discoverers of that body, avowedly several passengers of the minivan, appear never to have been interviewed or identified by the Egyptian authorities, which means that we have no objective confirmation of the driver's account. We might hypothetically imagine that the driver saw quite a different scene: for instance, people transporting a corpse at dawn, and so it was only the untimely intervention of the driver that forced them to construct a version of events not all that different from the truth.

Sui Generis

The meaning of a truth pursued for five years, a human, political, and juridical story that will go down as a part of the history of Italy, can be found in the words with which the investigating magistrates conclude their investigation: "The work of the Rome prosecutor's office of the Republic, even while always remaining within the confines of the code of criminal procedure, was in every single phase decidedly sui generis. Given the objective gravity of the crimes, a cruel murder that was simply the culminating moment of an extended succession of tortures. Given that circumstance that the suspects are members of the public institutions of another state. [...] The highest agencies of the Italian investigative structure, the Carabinieri ROS, the antiterrorism structure, and the SCO of the state police have all undertaken an extraordinary activity, in terms of both quality and quantity [...] Making this an investigation decidedly sui generis was the steadfast and productive collaboration with other Italian state agencies, the interest with which Italian public opinion has followed the investigation, thanks to the invaluable and decisive coverage produced by the Italian fourth estate, and the extraordinary efforts of Giulio Regeni's parents and their lawyer, as the persistently and tenaciously insisted on demanding truth and justice, all playing an essential role."
 

“Nove giorni al Cairo” documentary