Italian student Giulio Regeni died a day before his battered body was found in a ditch outside Cairo on 3 February and he was tortured shortly before his death, Giza's chief prosecutor Hossam Nassar said on Tuesday.
"We are sure of two things, actually of three. Our autopsy confirms that Giulio died no more than 24 hours before his corpse was discovered on on the morning of 3 February," Nassar told Italian daily La Repubblica.
"Therefore he died sometime between 2 and 3 February. The coroners who did the autopsy said the injuries he had were all inflicted 10-14 hours before he died," Nassar added.
Egyptian investigators will find Regeni's killers even if currently they do not have the evidence to solve "an apparently motiveless crime," he said.
Regeni, a 28-year-old Cambridge University PhD student vanished in Cairo on 25 January, the fifth anniversary of the start of the uprising which ended autocrat Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule.
Police had been deployed across Cairo to prevent demonstrations amid an unprecedented crackdown by Egypt's government on dissent.
Regeni's mutilated, half-naked body was found nine days later in a ditch on Cairo's western outskirts, bearing signs of torture. He had been researching trade union activism in Egypt and had published articles critical of the government and the lack of democracy in the country.
Last week, Egypt’s top coroner called "fabricated" a report by Reuters news agency suggesting he provided testimony to prosecutors that Regeni had been tortured for up to seven days before he was killed in order to gain information.
Regeni suffered “inhuman, animal-like” violence, Italy’s interior minister Angelino Alfano said following a second autopsy on the victim’s body when it was returned to Italy last month.
Cairo has rejected suspicions by many in Italy that Egyptian security forces are responsible for killing Regeni. It has said criminal motives, 'revenge' or terrorism could lie behind the murder but has so far made no arrests in the case.
It has also said Regeni was not a spy and denied he was arrested before he disappeared, as some eyewitnesses have reportedly claimed.
The Italian government has demanded that those responsible for Regeni's murder be brought to justice and the Egyptian government has vowed to do so.
