Report
Fellow prisoner said Giulio Regeni was tortured with electric shocks
New testimony has emerged in the trial of Regeni’s torturers in absentia. ‘The interrogations lasted for hours. I saw him again later, he was exhausted from torture.’
“He was exhausted from torture. The guards were carrying him on their shoulders toward his cell.” An eyewitness to the torture inflicted on Giulio Regeni by Egyptian National Security between Jan. 25 and Feb. 3, 2016, the day his body was found along the highway between Cairo and Alexandria, spoke to the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera in a video interview.
He is a Palestinian national who was held in the same prison, used as a place of torture for foreigners suspected of undermining Egypt's national security. His testimony is the first acquired by the judges of the First Assize Court of Rome in the trial in absentia of the four Egyptian intelligence officers: General Tareq Sabir, Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim, Uhsam Helmi, and Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif (the alleged torturer and executioner of the Friulian researcher).
On January 28 and 29, 2016, the former Palestinian detainee saw Regeni, but never spoke to him. “I saw him coming in the corridor, he was about 15 feet from me. Giulio was handcuffed with his hands behind his back, blindfolded and accompanied by two prison guards. The interrogations lasted for hours. I saw him again later, he was exhausted from torture. The guards were carrying him on their shoulders toward his cell. He was not naked, he was wearing dark pants and a white T-shirt.”
The witness recalled the jailers' repeated question to the Italian prisoner, “Giulio, where did you learn the techniques to withstand interrogation?” “They were nervous. They used electric shocks and tortured him with electricity,” the witness continued. “In addition to the jailers, there were investigators, officers I had not seen before, and a colonel, Ahmad, a doctor specializing in psychology. Colonel Tareq also witnessed Giulio's interrogations several times.”
During their 2020 investigations, prosecutors gathered testimony from five people, each identified with the first letters of the Greek alphabet. The witness referred to as Epsilon had seen Giulio half-naked and lying on the ground, handcuffed and “tied with iron chains,” “with two officers and two agents,” in room 13 on the second floor of the villa of horrors used by the Egyptian National Security Agency. The former Palestinian detainee who spoke up now is the second witness to Regeni's torture. He tells a story of detention with no rules, in “very narrow, cold, damp and foul-smelling cells,” almost “a tomb.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/giulio-torturato-con-la-corrente-la-testimonianza-choc-in-video on 2024-11-20