Rome, 2 June 2024 – The case Regeni breaks into election campaign: Rome he knew he was alive. According to some, the revelation made by Report could strike politically at Matteo RenziPrime Minister at the time, who said in a hearing at the parliamentary commission on the Regeni case that he had been there personally informed only on January 31, 2016. Does anyone want to put him in difficulty with the revelations of an Italian who worked in Cairo?
A torchlight procession for the truth about Giulio Regeni, tortured and killed in Egypt in 2016
The woman’s name is Zena Spinelli, a public relations expert who also had good sources in the Egyptian government and the services and who would have been interested in Gennaro Gervasio, then a professor at the British University in Cairo, who was the person Regeni was supposed to meet. Spinelli allegedly contacted her sources, in particular Ayman Rashed, assistant to the Egyptian justice minister, who began to deal with the matter on the 26th and therefore on January 29th, he would have sent a message on the mobile phone in which it was said in a cryptic manner, in English, “We don’t have him, but he’s still alive…” (we don’t have him but he’s still alive)..
Spinelli would have been interested in this the Italian services, as a source who worked with our embassy at the time told Report. “He showed me – said the source on Ranucci’s program – the WhatsApp where he says: We don’t have him but he’s still alive…”. The message was not found because, says the witness, Spinelli deleted everything: his conversations with Aise and that with Rashed, but the witness recorded that he had read it.
How this could damage Renzi is unclear, given that the then Italian ambassador in Cairo Maurizio Massari said and reiterated that already on the evening of January 25 “following Gervasio’s phone call, I immediately contacted the head of our intelligence office in the embassy” . From the following day Massari therefore took action in every way with the Egyptian government sources and underlined that “naturally I have kept in mind all these actions against the Egyptian authorities our authorities in Rome are constantly informedin particular the Farnesina and the Presidency of the Council”.
“Since January 26, the entire embassy took action and naturally we informed the competent administrations in Rome of all the steps”, confirmed the then first secretary Davide Bonvicini. “From 26 January – assured Ambassador Michele Valensise, former secretary general of the Farnesina – all terminals were informed.” In Rome they therefore knew of Regeni’s disappearance and of the Embassy’s desperate attempt to shed light, but according to Report’s thesis, they also knew that Regeni was alive. Assuming and not granting that this is true and that it could have helped him escape from the clutches of the regime, proof would be needed, however.
