Egypt's public prosecutor Nabil Sadeq travelled to Rome Tuesday to update investigators on progress in the probe of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni's brutal murder earlier this year, the Egypt Independent reports.
Italian counterparts invited Sadeq and a delegation of Egyptian prosecutors to visit Rome and discuss developments on the unsolved Regeni case, which has severely strained bilateral ties, the paper said.
Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian PhD student at Cambridge University disappeared in Cairo on 25 January, 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.
In October, Italy's foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni said Regeni's case was "an open wound" for his country.
In July, the Italian parliament voted to halt supplies of spare parts for F-16 fighter jets to Egypt over the Regeni case, a move Cairo which said could harm bilateral co-operation in several military and security fields.
Experts and Italian officials suspected from the outset that elements of the Egyptian state had carried out Regeni's murder, despite staunch denials by Egypt's president Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi and his government.
The high-profile case led Italy to recall its ambassador to Cairo in April in protest at the lack of progress in the investigation by Egyptian authorities and an allegedly lucklustre cooperation with Italian investigators.
