ROME - On the eve of the preliminary hearing in the trial of the four Egyptian secret service agents charged with the death of Italian student Giulio Regeni, a “shameful and unacceptable” documentary was released on YouTube heavily suggesting Regeni’s involvement with foreign secret service.

  Regeni was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, in Egypt conducting research into its independent trade unions and street vendors, when he was kidnapped and brutally tortured to death, allegedly suspected of being a spy due to his research and left wing leanings. His body was found in a ditch by the side of the Cairo-Alexandria highway on Feb. 3, 2016, having disappeared a week before.

  During the preliminary hearing that began on Thursday, Italian prosecutors asked the judge to put the four senior secret service agents on trial, a trial that will most likely take place in absentia because of Egypt’s refusal to grant Italy’s extradition requests. The trial has also been delayed until May 25 due to an Egyptian defence lawyer having to self-isolate after coming into contact with someone with Covid.

  The finger of blame for Regeni's death has always pointed towards Egyptian authorities, due to six independent reports from Egyptian police and intelligence officials to Reuters that Regeni was in police custody the day he disappeared, as well as Egypt’s initial refusal to cooperate with any investigations and an alleged attempt to stage a ‘robbery gone wrong’ to cover up the death.

  The journalist Declan Walsh, writing for the New York Times in 2017, said that Italian investigators "were hindered at every turn. Witnesses appeared to have been coached. Surveillance footage from the subway station near Regeni’s apartment had been deleted.”

  And now, on the day before four Egyptian security officials were set to face trial in Italy, this documentary was released.

  The documentary, entitled “The Story of Regeni”, was uploaded on Wednesday by a YouTube account created only last week, also called “The Story of Regeni”. The account, which has no information whatsoever about its creators, so far only features a short trailer for the documentary, released on Tuesday, and the documentary - uploaded twice, one with Italian subtitles and one with English. Both are littered with grammatical errors and typos.

  The 50 minute film features an actor recreating Regeni’s alleged movements prior to his disappearance, with Arabic narration, and there is no subtlety to the accusations of suspicious activity, the description reading, “The first documentary to reconstruct the strange movements of Giulio Regeni in Cairo… Who did Regeni meet in the main streets and in the side streets?!! What did he ask them? Why did he regularly frequent the bars in the centre, at the Qolali Terminus and in the area of Ahmed Helmy?! What was his relationship with street vendors in Cairo? And why was he interested in their participation on the next anniversary of the revolution?! [sic]”

  One look at the comments on either the Italian or English versions reveals the almost universal outrage at the film, with users calling it “fake propaganda”

  The documentary features interviews with Forza Italia Senator Maurizio Gasparri, the former Defence Minister Elisabetta Trenta, the former Chief of Staff of the Italian Air Force Leonardo Tricarico and journalist and presenter Fulvio Grimaldi.

  Trenta, however, said after its release, “the documentary that defiles the name of Giulio Regeni insinuates that he was a spy of the Muslim Brotherhood [an Egyptian organisation whom the Egyptian media and government also accused of his murder]. The documentary contains various interviews with several Italian subjects, including former generals and parliamentarians… I would like to clarify to everyone that I was contacted by Mr. Mahmoud Abd Hamid who introduced himself as a representative of the Arab broadcaster Al Arabiya in Italy. He wrote that their crew was in Rome to make a documentary on the diplomatic and economic relations between Italy and Egypt. 

  “If I had known that my interview would have ended up in a documentary that I consider shameful and unacceptable, naturally I would not have given my consent.”

  Her interview, which was cut down to just a few minutes, only mentions her hope that the two country’s relations will survive this affair, and that Egypt will cooperate in the trial. All the Italian politicians interviewed, no doubt also believing the film to be about diplomacy, expressed a wish that Italy and Egypt’s friendship survives the trial. Grimaldi was the only Italian participant who was, as he has been in the past, actively suspicious of Regeni.

  Erasmo Palazzotto, the President of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into Regeni’s death, called the documentary the “umpteenth unacceptable attempt at misdirection.”

  Regarding the involvement of Gasparri, who did criticise parts of the Italian judicial system and the media reaction to the tragedy, Palazzotto said in a statement, “it is serious that Gasparri discredited not only Regeni, but also his country, in fact justifying certain outrageous things done to our magistrates by Egyptian ones.”

  He continued, “Nurturing the culture of suspicion, by continuing to make allusions about [Regeni’s work at] Cambridge without any evidence, contributes to diverting attention away from Cairo, where Giulio Regeni was murdered and where his torturers and assassins go unpunished still today.”

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