Egypt cannot release phone records for Regeni investigation because it’s ‘unconstitutional’

Egypt refused to hand over phone records requested by the Italian prosecution for the ongoing investigation into the murder of Italian student Giulio Regeni because it is "unconstitutional," assistant Public Prosecutor Mostafa Suleiman said in a press conference Saturday.

According to Suleiman, Italy had requested records of phone calls made in the vicinity of Regeni’s house, the metro station where he was headed before he disappeared and the location in which his dead body was found. He added that Italy was adamant on obtaining the phone records, saying the continuation of judicial cooperation was conditional on acquiring them.

“But we still refused, because it is against the constitution and we will not comply under any conditions or circumstances,” he said.

Regeni’s body was discovered on the side of a road in February with severe torture marks, including cigarette burns, bruises, cuts and multiple stab wounds. The student went missing on January 25, 2016, while on the way to meet a friend in downtown Cairo, an area with heavy security presence on the fifth anniversary of the 2011 revolution.

On April 7, a delegation from Egypt’s Public Prosecution and Ministry of Interior traveled to Rome to present Italian officials with a 2000-page report on their investigation. The meeting had originally been scheduled for Tuesday, but was postponed to Thursday for undisclosed reasons.

Italian judicial sources were quoted in the Italian Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata as saying that Egypt’s report was still incomplete and lacking elements Italy had requested.

In the press conference, Suleiman said that the number of phone calls Italy had asked for amounted to one million calls.

“We didn’t refuse out of stubbornness or to hide something,” Suleiman said. “This request violates the constitution and is considered a crime,” he added, citing articles 57 and 58 of the Constitution.

The assistant public prosecutor also said that Italy had requested footage from surveillance cameras in the metro station where Regeni disappeared, but that Egypt could not provide it due to technical issues.

Suleiman explained that the footage is automatically deleted, but that they had presented it to the Italian public prosecutor during his visit to Egypt in February. He added that Egypt's public prosecution also approached the US company that made the surveillance cameras, which explained that the footage can be restored using a special program.

Suleiman stated, however, that the program is costly and that there’s a 50 percent chance it won’t be able to restore the footage.  

Egypt has complied with requests to hand over the nearly 600,000 files found on Regeni's laptops – some of which require passcodes to open, Suleiman said.

Suleiman said that the Egyptian forensics report was in line with the Italian one, “with no grave or significant differences.”

The Egyptian delegation also discussed with its counterpart the disappearance of Egyptian citizen Adel Moawad, Suleiman said, whereby Italy presented the procedures taken thus far to find him.