It is dotted with silences, cover-ups and hidden truths — the search for the truth about the murder of Giulio Regeni, the Italian researcher abducted and killed in Egypt between January and February 2016. Judicial cooperation between the Egyptian prosecutor's office and the Rome prosecutors has been characterised by an uncertain course ever since the body was found, in the late afternoon of 3 February, in a ditch running alongside the Cairo–Alexandria motorway. For Italy, it is a rude awakening. The young researcher from Fiumicello, who had just turned 28, had disappeared on the evening of 25 January while making his way to a meeting with a friend, Professor Gennaro Gervasio of the British University in Cairo. The two were supposed to go together to a party at friends' home. But Giulio never showed up for the appointment. From that evening of 25 January — the fifth anniversary of the revolution in Egypt — he vanishes without trace.

Italian ambassador Maurizio Massari is among the first to arrive at the mortuary. The Italian diplomat — tipped off about the discovery by "personal connections" within the Egyptian establishment — insists on entering and carries out the first identification of the body, which bears evident signs of torture.

Nine days of darkness and many questions

The Regeni affair causes a chill between Egypt and Italy for the first time. At stake are solid diplomatic relations, a business turnover worth billions of euros and a commercial partnership that had never before entered into crisis. But there are too many questions surrounding the young man's death: the few certainties concern the date of his disappearance, 25 January, and that of the discovery of the body, 3 February. In between lie nine days of "darkness" and signs of torture all too similar to those that the security services inflict on political opponents of the government, in a climate of total impunity.

On 4 February, the director of the General Administration of Investigations in Giza, General Khaled Shalabi, maintains that "there is no suspected crime behind the death of the young Italian Giulio Regeni." In exclusive statements to the website Al Youm7, the general declares that preliminary investigations point to a "road accident." It is the first in a long series of lies and cover-ups on the part of the Egyptian authorities involved in the affair.

The following day, 5 February, a team of seven officers from the Police, Carabinieri and Interpol lands in Cairo to follow the investigation. Meanwhile, reports — circulated in certain media outlets — of links between the young researcher and the Italian intelligence services are denied.

Cooperation between the two prosecutor's offices gets off on the wrong foot from the outset: among the documents requested by Rome but not handed over by Cairo are CCTV footage from the areas Regeni was due to pass through before his disappearance, and full documentation on the autopsy, mobile phone cell data and transcripts of key witness interviews.

At the beginning of March, a man named Mohammed Fawzy claims to have seen Regeni on the afternoon of the day before his disappearance, arguing furiously with another foreigner near the Italian consulate in Cairo. On 13 March, Fawzy maintained that the Italian government knew the identity of the young scholar's killer but was concealing the evidence, adding that whoever had killed Regeni wanted to sabotage trade relations between Italy and Egypt. This is the "conspiracy theory," soon set aside when phone records reveal that on the afternoon of 24 January, at the very time he was allegedly seen arguing, Giulio was in fact speaking with his girlfriend over Skype.

The gang of five

What again irritates investigators and Italian public opinion — after the insinuations made by certain Egyptian newspapers about Giulio's alleged homosexuality and his social circle — is an article published by Al Watan in March, linking Regeni's murder to a gang of kidnappers of Westerners broken up in Cairo. According to the newspaper, the five — all killed in a police raid — were the very individuals responsible for the abduction, torture and killing of the researcher. At the home of one of them, Regeni's passport, his Italian identity card, a credit card and his University of Cambridge pass are indeed found. But the story is quickly dismantled, and it emerges that at the time of Regeni's disappearance, the gang's leader was more than 100 kilometres from the site of the abduction. The complaint lodged by the families of the five killed, who reveal a plot against their relatives, lends weight to the hypothesis of some form of involvement by the Egyptian security forces.

On 8 April, Italy decides to recall Ambassador Massari to Rome "for consultations." He is to be replaced, a few months later, by Giampaolo Cantini, who has not yet taken up his post in Cairo. It is a measured as much as a significant step. According to the Regeni family, the absence of an Italian diplomatic representative in Egypt during those long months was decisive in exerting pressure on the Egyptian authorities.

The independent trade unions thesis

In the Italian press, the curtain of silence that had fallen over the abuses committed by the Egyptian government is torn aside, revealing that the same fate that has befallen hundreds of Egyptians over the past two years can descend upon a young Western researcher, a European citizen, a passionate and brilliant student — someone whom one commentator, in a particularly apt turn of phrase, has described as "the best of the youth" of our country and beyond.

"I could only recognise him from the tip of his nose," Giulio's mother, Paola Deffendi, says at a press conference, shortly after viewing her son's devastated body. "I won't tell you what they did to that face. I thought that all the evil in the world had been poured onto him."

While waiting for a truth that is slow to arrive, Amnesty International launches a campaign that colours the web and the facades of local authorities, municipalities and universities from the north to the south of Italy. It demands, in black on yellow: "Truth for Giulio Regeni."

Meanwhile, an increasingly detailed portrait of Giulio Regeni emerges in the Italian media: the young man — a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge — was in Cairo to work on a thesis on the prospects of the Egyptian economy and on independent trade unions.

In the mosaic of details that is slowly piecing itself back together, an important date emerges: 11 December 2015. Giulio had attended an assembly convened with the aim of uniting the trade union front against labour reform. Around a hundred people were reportedly in the room, but what struck the researcher was the presence of someone taking photographs with a mobile phone, who had also taken several of him. Two weeks later, according to sources, the police went looking for Regeni at his home but did not find him.

The search for the truth amid cover-ups and omissions

But it takes until 7 September for a first, tentative breakthrough in the case: Cairo's investigators admit for the first time that the police had shown an interest in Regeni in early January, following a complaint lodged by the head of the street vendors' union, Mohamed Abdallah.

Abdallah's phone records reveal continuous contacts with the National Security headquarters in Nasr City. The police officers to whom he had been providing information are identified, as are those who had carried out checks on the young man following the union official's complaint. The Cairo magistrates are keen to point out that these checks lasted "only three days" at the beginning of January and concluded with no result. The police officers involved in the killing of the "gang of five" — accused of being responsible for Giulio's death — are also identified.

On 28 December, Abdallah declares in an interview with the Arabic Huffington Post that he had reported Regeni: "We are on their side. Giulio was asking too many questions about national security. He will have been killed by the people who sent him here, after I had him found out. I am proud of having done it, and every good Egyptian in my position would have done the same," he states.

On 23 January, an Egyptian broadcaster releases the recording of a video in which Giulio and Abdallah speak together. The one recording it, without Giulio's knowledge, is the trade unionist, who insists on asking him for money in an attempt to lure him into a trap. But the young man stands firm on his principles: "it's not my money, I can't do with it as I please." The sum in question is around £10,000, an amount Giulio had wanted to request on behalf of the street vendors' union through his university, earmarked for a development project.

The suspicion of a state murder

He had spoken about it with Abdallah before realising that he was not someone he could trust. He would become aware of this in early January, and would note in his diary that Abdallah is "a human wretch." Perhaps Abdallah wanted to keep the money for himself; more likely, he wanted to establish himself as a "privileged" source of information for the security services. The fact remains that he reports Giulio as a "spy" and records a video with a hidden camera with the intention of framing him.

At the end of the recording, a few seconds of audio are enough to make clear that the chain of responsibility for Giulio's death stretches far beyond the mere street vendor. Giulio's interlocutor can be heard clearly saying: "I'm done here, come and take the equipment off me."