Killing of Giulio Regeni

Banner reading 'Truth for Giulio Regeni' displayed by Turin City Council, 5 April 2016

Giulio Regeni (15 January 1988 – January–February 2016) was an Italian PhD student at the University of Cambridge who was kidnapped in Cairo, Egypt, on 25 January 2016, the fifth anniversary of the Tahrir Square protests, and found dead on 3 February near an Egyptian secret service prison. His body showed clear signs of torture; in particular, some letters of the alphabet had been engraved on his skin with sharp objects, and this practise of torture had been widely documented as a distinctive trait of the Egyptian police. This evidence immediately put Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's regime under accusation.

Quotes about

• Lying on a steel stretcher in the centre of the room was the boy's body. He lay wrapped in the white cotton and gauze shroud in which he had been laid out, which left only the outline of his face and an unkempt black beard exposed.
  He resembled Christ.
  He had travelled in a light-coloured, lacquered wooden coffin. From Cairo to Fiumicino Airport.

• Quoted in Carlo Bonini, Il corpo del reato, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2016. ISBN 9788807173103, first lines.

• His body had turned out to be a canvas of horror, on which his tormentors had even inscribed a letter intended as a mark. And in that word – torture – now lay the point where the destinies of two young men, with stories, lives and aspirations that were so different, yet so similar, collided. A Cambridge researcher, a citizen of the world. A drug addict from Morena. (Stefano Cucchi) Two young men, wronged in places that were the very opposite of respect for human rights. The Egyptian military regime of al-Sisi. The Italian Republic, born out of the Resistance. Yet both Bodies have become irrepressible witnesses to state abuse.

• Quoted in Carlo Bonini, Il corpo del reato, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2016. ISBN 9788807173103, Pars Sevent. Contrappasso, p. 285.

• Regeni's death is a mystery hidden in broad daylight.
  'It's always like this,' he thought, 'when a Body bears witness to the truth.' You just have to want to see that truth.
  And to tell it.

• Quoted in Carlo Bonini, Il corpo del reato, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2016. ISBN 9788807173103, explicit.

• They've fed us false information and red herrings, but we've made great progress in a year. We are snatching names and truths from the Egyptian government. We have perseverance and patience, and we will not stop.

• Erri De Luca, quoted in Giulio Regeni, manifestazione nazionale per la verità, Prideonline.it, 27 January 2017.

• Giulio Regeni's murder was a wound to our consciences.

• Paolo Gentiloni, quoted in Verbatim Transcript of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 5 April 2016.

• We will only stop when we find the truth, the real truth and not a convenient one: the pain of the Regeni family is the pain of the whole of Italy.

• Matteo Renzi, quoted in Il testimone smonta la pista dei rapinatori, Repubblica.it, 31 March 2016.

• Was Giulio Regeni Italian? Does Prime Minister Meloni, who says she wants to defend Italians, believe in this, and does she believe it is right to also take action to demand the truth about Giulio Regeni? Or was Regeni a 'second-class' Italian, an Italian who didn't deserve the truth, an Italian who doesn't deserve protection from his country?

• Filiberto Zaratti, quoted in Verbatim Transcript of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Assembly Session No 9, 10 November 2022.