Murder of Giulio Regeni

Giulio Regeni
Born	(1988-01-15)15 January 1988 Trieste, Italy
Disappeared	25 January 2016 (aged 28) Cairo, Egypt
Cause of death	Torture murder
Body discovered	3 February 2016 Cairo–Alexandria highway Cairo, Egypt
Nationality	Italian
Education	UWC-USA Girton College, Cambridge (MPhil)
Alma mater	Cambridge University

Giulio Regeni (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdʒuːljo reˈdʒɛːni], 15 January 1988 – c. January–February 2016) was an Italian PhD student at Cambridge University who was kidnapped in Cairo 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 practice 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.

Regeni's killing attracted national and international attention, sparking a heated political debate on the involvement of the Egyptian government itself in the affair and in the subsequent coverups through one of its security services. These suspicions gave rise to strong diplomatic tensions with Egypt. According to the European Parliament, the murder of Regeni was not an isolated event but was part of a context of torture, deaths in prison, and forced disappearances that occurred throughout Egypt during the 2010s.