The collapse of the “Regeni settlement”: Italy towards European escalation

Cairo | A few days ago, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi canceled a planned visit to Belgium, as the second leg of his European tour after France. The real reason for the measure was not disclosed, but – according to informed sources – it is linked to criticism of human rights that the government preferred to avoid, noting that the regime has taken many judicial measures to facilitate the visit to Paris, but in Brussels the situation looks different. As for Rome, Sisi or any of its representatives are no longer welcome, neither on official visits nor in serious discussions, under the weight of internal pressures there, and calls to escalate the issue in Europe.

From the outset, the Egyptian “al-Laffa” tries to end the crisis by kidnapping the Italian researcher Giulio Regeni and torturing him to his death inside the headquarters of the “State Security” (now “National Security”), and then dumping his body onto a road, beginning by filming the incident. However, it was a forced robbery, which led to the creation of another story about his murder after a failed homosexual relationship, and accompanied him during the last years in terms of fabricating testimonies to disperse investigative teams. Likewise, the judicial arrangement towards each prosecutor to deal with the situation according to their vision was unsuccessful: in Egypt the case was closed, and in Italy four agents were charged. The Italian interior rose up against him and the pressure on the ruling coalition reached a level where the government could not defend itself, but was forced to adopt hostile stances towards its Egyptian counterpart, even at the level of official statements. In other words: the political truce and the agreement to circumvent the issue in a few weeks has become a necessarily canceled agreement, and this is not linked only to Italian anger, but rather to Cairo’s refusal to provide information at the level. official on the accused officers for whom the Rome Prosecutor has conclusive evidence incriminating them. The matter is therefore complicated, especially with Rome’s intention to press charges and initiate trials as soon as the deadline for officers to present their charges expires.

Egypt believes Italy is temporarily experiencing a backlash due to the deal to close the case

The current Egyptian fear lies in the possibility that Rome will abandon the previous agreement, which contains a narrative that says that the operation was not systematic and supervised by the Ministry of the Interior, but rather an “individual act”, mainly because the refusal to hand over the accused through “Interpol” signifies an Egyptian contempt for the extradition of those implicated in the murder. They were found guilty of this in preliminary investigations. Even attempts to reach a criminal settlement of the case by trying the accused before the Egyptian judiciary, in accordance with procedures that take years to be followed by a presidential pardon after a short period of time, have been dragged down by the wind, as a result of the Ministry’s refusal to charge its officials in the first place, especially since the incident was unintentional. Apart from “terrorizing the investigator” and forcing him to leave the country, as the official version says. However, sources assure that this scenario is still strongly present, but it is in the exclusive hands of the Attorney General Hamada Al-Sawy, who ordered the closure of the case, and only he can reopen it with the presentation of a new report or information officially, or more precisely: the regime’s response to pressure, given that the law and the constitution give the president the power to pardon the defendants, all officers, and one of them retired some time ago.
Egypt believes Italy is witnessing a temporary backlash due to consensus to close the case, despite recent Italian statements that “the evidence is shocking.” The authorities say that everything reached and presented was reviewed by the Egyptian prosecutor’s office, and they found legal loopholes that they will exploit to handle the situation later. However, the main crisis remains how to calm the situation on the human rights front, as some organizations seek to exploit the event to condemn the Egyptian regime in front of its European partners. Despite the fact that Cairo detects the relative danger and monitors the situation in an updated way, a well-informed source speaks of “stability” in relations with Italy, far from judicial decisions that go in an expected and already known direction, saying to ” Al-Akhbar “that his country has no intention of taking any steps As the case, or even the presence of a representative from the embassy to follow him, because it was” built against the truth “! Currently, there is talk that Arab and European pressures for human rights are focused on arms exports to Egypt and coordination processes with the “Interior”, which are two sensitive issues, but the regime until now believes that it is capable to manage them no matter what happens in the Regeni case, noting that the Italian Foreign Ministry said yesterday that it is The European Union should participate in pressuring Egypt to hand over the addresses of the suspects, as well as urge the European Union to consider the case as European and not just Italian.

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