Italian guy had mysterious 'letters' carved into his body

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Hafiz
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Re: Italian guy had mysterious 'letters' carved into his bod

Post by Hafiz »

Very good point Newcastle.

Don't have an answer to why a state security system would do all the torture to the body and then leave it to be found.

My best reading is that the body was found in a prominent place - albeit on the side of a road. It was found near the Pyramids.

If you were the filth or a spook you would surely cover your tracks. Burn the body or put it in the Red Sea. Possibly near UK tourists. Not leave it on the side of a major road.

Some say - I'm not convinced - that these agencies are so artless and used to impunity that they don't care. They make up ridiculous stories - which collapse soon as Reuters looks at them - and dump bodies knowing no one will challenge the traffic accident story. In this case the forensic work in Italy exposed the lies. Without this external work the initial story might have stuck.

Another version is that the security services are skilled - they would have destroyed the body - but the interior ministry/police types are crude and violent.

There is no longer any doubt that he was systematically tortured according to well recognized professional state 'protocols'. The evidence for this is the marks on the body.

I think we can be certain that his family will never get justice and the Italian state will concede political and economic realities.

There is also a precedent for believing that Egypt will accept no responsibility under any circumstances. and a belief in the absolute impunity of the police/security services. For example nearly 200 police officers were put on trial for killing protesters during the events of the January 25 Revolution, and all of them were acquitted, including former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly and his top aides. There are many other similar examples.
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/me ... elease#Pol
and this is not written by some western leftist but by the Assistant Editor-in-Chief of al Ahram. Everyone knows what is going on.

The first revolution may have been, in part, about police abuses but no one has done a jot since to reform them.


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Re: Italian guy had mysterious 'letters' carved into his bod

Post by newcastle »

You may think so Hafiz.....I couldn't possibly comment :st
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Re: Italian guy had mysterious 'letters' carved into his bod

Post by newcastle »

Hafiz wrote:
The first revolution may have been, in part, about police abuses but no one has done a jot since to reform them.

You may think so Hafiz........I couldn't possibly comment. :st
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Re: Italian guy had mysterious 'letters' carved into his bod

Post by Hafiz »

The Guardian is on to this with its usual indignation and hot air in a very recent long feature article. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ ... lio-regeni. With the Guardian’s moral outrage on your side who can be against you?

Their choice of correspondent is interesting. A NYC based expert on the Mafia and Italy.

Most/all of the content seems to have been taken from other news sources and he confirms all other independent views that it’s a cover up.

He makes some new points or interpretations/speculations on this difficult to understand issue not covered in posts above which are also a part answer to Newcastle’s points:

1. How could they be so stupid.

“The Egyptians may well have hoped that the outside world, with no independent information, would have little choice but to accept their unsatisfying explanation for Regeni’s death. But in the digital age, getting away with murder has become more difficult.”

2. The Egyptian ‘explanations/responses’ are various and continue.

“After publishing the (recent) report (the fullest on the issue which claims six internal security/police sources that he was rounded up), Reuters’ Cairo bureau chief was threatened with criminal prosecution and left the country. Egyptian police recently detained an Egyptian Reuters reporter for unspecified reasons.

In May of this year, the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior accidentally leaked an internal memo proposing a ban on all press coverage of the Regeni case.”

…” (from an interview with the President) “Why was the body found right when the minister of economic development and the Italian delegation were here to strengthen our cooperation?” he asked. Sisi also mentioned the shooting down of a Russian tourist airliner in October 2015. “Russian tourism and Italian tourism [in Egypt] have collapsed to nothing … Fill in the dots of these different episodes and you have a clear picture of an attempt to strike the Egyptian economy and isolate Egypt.”

3. The Security Services were on edge.

“He (Regeni) probably knew that the Egyptian authorities were working themselves up to a fever pitch in anticipation of the anniversary. Police had reportedly searched 5,000 apartments in Cairo, in an effort to intimidate anyone who might be planning a demonstration.”

4. His area of study was sensitive (others say not).

“Independent labor unions are a particularly sensitive topic in Egypt under the Sisi government, because unions were seen as a key galvanizing force in the 2011 revolution. Traditionally, labor unions were government-run – more a means of controlling workers than representing their interests. The first independent trade union was formed in 2009, but the movement truly took flight after Tahrir Square.”

..” Regeni’s particular area of research was a nascent independent union of street vendors, a large group that was difficult to control and a cause of considerable concern to the government. Egypt has an estimated five million street vendors, who sell everything from snacks and drinks to cheap clothes and kitchen utensils. In a country of 80 to 90 million people, as many as a quarter of Egyptian families depend to some degree on the income of a street vendor.”

5. Street vendors are used by the police/security services as informers.

“In order to remain on the street and avoid police harassment, street vendors were themselves expected to let police know of anything or anyone unusual or suspicious. “One of the things that has happened in Egypt in the past few years, which we didn’t fully recognize, is that the street peddlers are frequently used as police informants,” said one Cambridge scholar, who preferred not to be named. Scattered around the city, present on nearly every block and square, the street vendors form a natural surveillance network.”

6. Towards the end Regeni might have gone feral (my interpretation).

“One of the proposals (his/the unions? Not clear from Guardian article) was for a “series of regional conferences that lead after a few months to a large national assembly and perhaps a unitary protest (“To Tahrir!” said several of those present.)
Regeni’s article (under a pseudonym in an Italian far left journal) ends with a few sentences that look like fighting words. “In the repressive context of the Sisi government, the fact that there are popular and spontaneous initiatives that break the wall of fear is significant and represent in and of themselves an important push for change.

“To challenge the state of emergency, the government’s appeals to stability and social harmony in the name of the ‘war on terrorism’, means today, even indirectly, to challenge the very basis on which this regime bases its existence and its repression of civil society.”

7. If he was a spy he was a destitute one ill-equipped to even support himself, let alone bribe others.

“We had his bank accounts, which showed he had almost no money,” said Alessandra Ballerini, the lawyer for the Regeni family. “This is a boy who wore his father’s old bathing suit and used his mother’s old backpack because he didn’t want to be a financial burden to his family.”

8. His injuries were consistent with police/security services torture techniques.

“His torturers appear to have carved letters into his flesh, a well-documented practice of the Egyptian police.”

…” They (the Italian autopsy) established that Regeni died between 10pm on 1 February and 10pm on 2 February. “This is important because it means that he was alive for at least six or seven days and tortured repeatedly during that time,” said one Italian investigator”

9. More theories.

“There are two theories,” said Karim Abdelrady, an Egyptian human rights lawyer. “One is that there is a feud between the Egyptian secret services, and one branch dumped the body in order to embarrass the other.” A long, detailed anonymous letter that was sent to the Italian embassy in Bern, Switzerland and published by La Repubblica described complicated machinations within different branches of the Egyptian secret services, and reported that Regeni’s body had been wrapped in an Egyptian army blanket, as if to direct suspicion towards the military police. But Italian investigators say that they have no way to confirm or deny the information in this document.

“The other theory,” explained Abdelrady, “is that the Egyptian police thought they could get away with it by blaming a band of criminals, and that people would not think the Egyptian police would be so stupid as to leave the body where it could be found.”

“This case cannot be understood without understanding the context of generalised paranoia in the country,” said one foreign scholar who has lived in Cairo for many years. “For the last three years, many high-level government officials, including members of the military, have spoken publicly about foreign conspiracies to undermine Egypt. This is bound to seep down to all levels of the police and military.”

…” The Egyptian prosecutors seemed unable to understand why their Italian colleagues did not accept the evidence they were given. “The Egyptian authorities seemed shocked that our (Italian) police kept asking questions after they came up with the ‘gang’ of killers and the tray with Regeni’s documents,” said one Italian investigator. “Their attitude seemed to be: ‘hey, we found the criminals, we have even killed them. This should put an end to it.’” Surely, they thought, concerns of state – the close relations between two nations, billions of dollars of commercial ties – should count more than the life of one person, who had been killed by mistake. They seemed to find it impossible to understand that the Italian government would have to account to public opinion and could not, even if it had wanted to, accept a flimsy, implausible account of Regeni’s death.”

10. Other researchers have been detained.

“In December, 2015, he (unnamed close friend of Regeni) said, Egyptian police detained a young French scholar who was conducting research on a workers’ movement, keeping her in jail overnight. “These kinds of things had been happening more often – but they go unreported because the scholars don’t say anything, so that they can return to Egypt in the future.”

11. Cambridge and his supervisor there have been less than helpful to Italian police, although this might have changed, Overall their response has been odd.

In a bizarre interpretation of the Guardian article the so-called independent Egyptian newspaper albawba stated the other day that the Guardian proves he was a spy. The ever reliable Madr Maser ridicules albawba at http://www.madamasr.com/news/egyptian-n ... -languages. so I guess the local ‘interpretations’ continue.
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