Ln January 25, 2016, Cairo was effectively placed under siege. It is the fifth anniversary of the occupation of Tahrir Square, in the center of the capital, by demonstrators determined to bring about the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, in power for thirty years.
To everyone’s surprise, this popular uprising spread throughout Egypt and achieved, after only two weeks, the overthrow of the despot. But hopes of a democratic transition, already dashed by the election as president of the Islamist Mohamed Morsi in June 2012, faded with the coup d’état of General Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi, a year later.
Sissi attempted to legitimize his putsch by officially obtaining 97% of the votes in a parody of the presidential election in May 2014. The Egyptian dictator, however, harbors no illusions about his real popularity, hence the extreme nervousness of the political police in this anniversary of the “Tahrir revolution”.
A 28-year-old researcher
Giulio Regeni celebrated his 28th birthday in Cairo on January 15, 2016.e birthday. Passionate about the Arab world, its language and its culture, he is pursuing a thesis in economics at the University of Cambridge on the labor movement in Egypt, particularly on independent unions. No one knows when such research attracted the attention of Egyptian intelligence.
The only certainty is that Regeni left his home on the evening of January 25 to go not far from Tahrir Square where he ” disappears “. The Sissi regime has, in fact, trivialized the ” disappearance “ of thousands of his opponents, in sinister echo of this mass repression by the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s. Regeni’s body was found on February 3 in a ditch in the suburbs of Cairo. The remains of the young student bear the scars of atrocious torture.
Matteo Renzi, the Italian Prime Minister, demands of Sissi that “ those responsible for this horrible crime are brought to justice “. The investigation was nevertheless entrusted to an Egyptian officer convicted of torturing a detainee in 2003.
The Minister of the Interior, Magdy Abdel Ghaffar, holds an exceptional press conference to deny the revelations of New York Times on the arrest and detention of Regeni by the Egyptian services. It is true that the minister spent his entire career within state security, renamed national security after the 2011 revolution, towards which all suspicions are directed.
On March 10, 2016, the European Parliament adopted, by an overwhelming majority of 588 votes to 10, a resolution summoning the Egyptian authorities to cooperate fully with Italian justice. Two weeks later, Cairo announces the death, in an exchange of gunfire with the police, of four gang members “specialized in kidnapping foreigners to rob them while posing as police officers”. The Egyptian authorities attribute full responsibility for the kidnapping and assassination of Regeni to this gang. The fact that all members of the gang have been eliminated should, according to Cairo, close the Regeni case.
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