" Giulio Regeni was handcuffed with his hands behind his back, blindfolded. I saw him again as he was leaving the interrogation, exhausted by torture. He was between two jailers who were carrying him on their shoulders. They were taking him back to the cells."

He states this in the video of a documentary broadcast by Al Jazeera, and screened today in the courtroom at the trial underway in Rome for the death of the researcher, a Palestinian citizen who was detained in an Egyptian detention facility .

"He wasn't naked," he said during the interview, "he was wearing clothes, dark pants and a white T-shirt. I saw another prisoner with signs of torture on his back. The jailers insisted a lot with the question "Giulio, where did you learn to overcome the techniques to face the interrogation." They were nervous, they used electric shocks and tortured him with electricity ."

In addition to the jailers, the witness also told the court, "there were investigators, officers I had not seen before and a colonel, a doctor specialized in psychology. There was no contact with the outside world: the feeling was that of being in a tomb. I was kidnapped, detained and then released without a reason ."

The process

A few days ago, the Italian researcher's roommate testified in Cairo, heard in a protected manner for security reasons in the trial of four 007s: General Tariq Sabir, Colonels Athar Kamal and Uhsam Helmi and Major Magdi Ibrahim Abdel Sharif. An alleged member of the Egyptian secret services, around December 15, 9 years ago, she said, went to Regeni's home and asked his roommate, an Egyptian lawyer, for a copy of his passport.

The "Beta witness", who at the time of the facts shared the apartment with Giulio and Mohamed El Sayed, recounted what the lawyer told him. «The police showed up at our house and asked for a copy of Giulio's document. El Sayed was convinced that this check had been carried out by National Security, the Egyptian secret service» . The witness, who taught German in a private school in the Egyptian capital, was not present at home that morning.

"El Sayed was shocked, scared: he was convinced that it was the secret services even if they used as an excuse a sort of filing of all the foreigners present in the city. In Egypt there is a sort of paranoia among the citizens for these dynamics, they fear the authorities". According to what was reported by the witness, El Sayed "exchanged phone numbers with the secret service agent and did not tell Giulio about the visit. He only told him that foreigners must provide documents and show up at the police station. Maybe he suspected that he had done something he shouldn't have done. After Giulio disappeared - she added - the police returned to the house but there was no real inspection, they didn't take anything away. I was questioned three times by the Egyptian authorities and I can't say whether the officer who knocked on our door in December was among the people who questioned me".

From an analysis of the telephone records carried out by the ROS investigators, and present in a report filed in recent days, there would appear to have been telephone contacts between the alleged intelligence agent and Giulio's roommate on January 26, the day after the Friulian researcher disappeared: Regeni, according to the prosecution, was picked up at a subway station in Cairo.

(Unioneonline/D)

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