World

Lawyer for family of slain Italian warns Egypt suspects

05 of December 2018

FILE - In this Feb. 12, 2016, file photo, the family of Giulio Regeni follow his coffin during the funeral service in Fiumicello, Northern Italy. Egypt’s official news agency says prosecutors have rejected an Italian request to name several policemen as suspects in the 2016 killing of Regeni, an Italian graduate student in Cairo. The agency’s report, published Monday, Dec. 3, 2018, in state-owned newspapers, says the prosecutors turned down a similar request by the Italians a year ago on the grounds that there was no concrete evidence to incriminate the policemen. (AP Photo/Paolo Giovannini, File),FILE - In this Feb. 12, 2016, file photo, the family of Giulio Regeni follow his coffin during the funeral service in Fiumicello, Northern Italy. Egypt’s official news agency says prosecutors have rejected an Italian request to name several policemen as suspects in the 2016 killing of Regeni, an Italian graduate student in Cairo. The agency’s report, published Monday, Dec. 3, 2018, in state-owned newspapers, says the prosecutors turned down a similar request by the Italians a year ago on the grounds that there was no concrete evidence to incriminate the policemen. (AP Photo/Paolo Giovannini, File)

ROME (AP) — The lawyer for the family of an Italian researcher tortured and killed in Egypt is urging the five key Egyptian suspects to come forward and say what they know.

Attorney Alessandra Ballerini read out the names Wednesday of the five secret service members and police investigators suspected in Giulio Regeni’s slaying, a day after Rome prosecutors formally opened an investigation into them.

She said “these people should be afraid” to travel, and added that as many as 20-40 people were involved.

Regeni, a Cambridge University graduate student, was researching trade unions in Egypt when he disappeared in Cairo on January 25, 2016 — the fifth anniversary of Egypt’s popular uprising. His body was found several days later by the side of a highway near Cairo with signs of torture.