But the Egyptian authorities knew that body was Regeni's when they called Ambassador Maurizio Massari to tell him of their finding. How they could have been so certain of Giulio's identity, before anyone had yet identified him, is just one of the many questions that - for the past year - the Egyptian police forces have dodged.
The initial reluctance of the Egyptian authorities to cooperate and the invention of a series of implausible stories about Regeni's involvement in a car accident, in a homosexual spat and later in a case of drug trafficking spurred a diplomatic crisis with Italy that lasts to this day.
Confronted by the Italian investigators and the insisting demands of the Italian government for more cooperation, the Egyptian authorities decided to follow a different strategy. They would ration the information to be shared with the Italians, dilute their response in an effort to buy time and cover up an embarrassing case that had taken the shape of a state-sponsored murder. [...]
Never before had one of them been kidnapped, brutally tortured and killed. Why would the Egyptian intelligence services decide to arrest a student from one of the world's most renowned universities, torture him for seven consecutive days, as the autopsy later revealed, and take the risk of prompting a diplomatic crisis with Italy and the UK?
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