Pope Francis will bring up the unsolved murder of Italian doctoral student Giulio Regeni in talks with Egypt's president Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi on Friday during his visit to Cairo, daily Al-Ahram reports.
Al-Ahram cited a diplomatic source as saying that Regeni's brutal killing last year will be among several topics that Francis will discuss with Sisi, including the rise of radicalism in the Middle East and the Catholic Church's relations with the Islamic world.
Regeni's mother Paola at a conference in Rome earlier this month asked Francis to highlight her son's murder during his two-day trip to Cairo.
"We are sure the Pope cannot fail to remember Giulio on this trip, joining our concrete demand for truth to finally get peace," Paola Regeni told journalists at the Italian Senate upper house of parliament on 3 April.
Francis appeared interested in the case when he met Regeni's parents earlier this year, the Italian Senate's human rights commission president, Luigi Manconi, told Adnkronos.
Italy withdrew its ambassador to Egypt over 28-year-old Regeni's brutal murder early last year, which experts and officials widely believe was the work of state actors - despite staunch denials by Sisi and his government.
Regeni, a PhD student at Cambridge University disappeared in Cairo on 25 January 2016, the fifth anniversary of the 2011 uprising that overthrew longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.
Ten days later, Regeni's battered, disfigured body was found dumped on the Cairo-Alexandria highway, bearing signs of torture. He had been researching independent trade unions in Egypt and had published articles critical of the government, writing under a pseudonym
Egypt has pledged to bring Regeni's killers to justice and Egyptian prosecutors probing the murder have held regular meetings with Italian investigators in Rome.
