Rome public prosecutors on Thursday opened a murder investigation into the death of Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni, whose badly beaten body was found on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital bearing signs of torture.
Regeni, 28, disappeared in Cairo on the evening of 25 January, the fifth anniversary of the Tahrir Square demonstrations which led to the fall of longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
Regeni vanished after leaving his home in an upper middle-class district of Cairo to take the underground to meet a friend downtown, but never arrived, the friend said. Regeni had been in Egypt since September, researching the economy with a focus on trade unions since 2011.
An Egyptian journalist testified she saw police arresting a foreigner at Giza metro station on the evening of 25 January, in what may be a vital clue to Regeni's fate, Italy's La Repubblica daily reported on Thursday.
One of Regeni's Egyptian friends, who preferred to remain unnamed, claimed he received several emails and phone calls from Regeni asking for contacts of labour rights activists to interview for his research, pro-government daily Al-Ahram reported.
Regeni vowed that he would not go out for any interviews or fieldwork until after the Tahrir Square anniversary, the daily cited the unnamed friend as saying. In the run-up to the anniversary, police detained activists and warned people not to demonstrate in a clamp-down across the capital, which was almost deserted on 25 January.
"I was summoned by security officials after Regeni's disappearance. Their questions were focused on the purpose of his visit and studies. There were also some questions about his personal affiliation," Al-Ahram quoted Regeni's friend as saying.
Regeni’s body was found half-naked in a ditch late on Wednesday and was identified by his roommate. It is currently in Cairo's Zinhom morgue, Al-Ahram reported.
Regeni allegedly wrote regularly under a pseudonym for Italian Communist daily Il Manifesto according to a journalist with the paper, Simone Pieranni. Regeni used a pseudonym because he feared for his personal safety, according to Pieranni and another contributor to Il Manifesto, Giuseppe Acconcia.
Italy has summoned Egypt's ambassador Amr Mostafa Kamal Helmy over Regeni's death and is demanding maximum cooperation in a full investigation.
The Italian foreign ministry also asked for Regeni's corpse to be repatriated as soon as possible to Italy, where the mayor of his hometown of Fiumicello in northeast Italy has declared a day of public mourning.
Days before his body was discovered, Regeni's disappearance was widely circulated by social media users on both Facebook and Twitter questioning his whereabouts with a trending hashtag ‘Where is Giulio Regeni?’
