Six months ago, Ibrahim Farouk, a 21-year-old university student who drove a minibus for extra money, started his day doing a routine job shuttling four neighbourhood men he vaguely knew around Cairo.

His passengers that day – three members of a single family and a close friend of theirs – were known to be petty criminals and had a history of run-ins with the authorities. Two had served time in jail for stealing a wallet in 2001 and one had been a drug addict. The men’s relatives say they were heading to a decorating job in the suburb of Tagammu al-Khamis, but the group never made it to their destination.

They were killed in a hail of police gunfire. Within hours of their death, Egyptian authorities accused them of being part of a gang of thieves that targeted foreigners, and an alleged house raid linked them to a heinous act: the torture and murder of an Italian researcher named Giulio Regeni. The battered and disfigured body of the 28-year-old Cambridge PhD student, who was pursuing sensitive research in Egypt, had been found in a roadside ditch between Cairo and Alexandria seven weeks earlier.

Pro-government media quickly published graphic pictures of the blood-spattered bodies of the five dead Egyptians – Tarek Saad Abdel Fattah, 52; his son Saad Tarek Saad, 26; his son-in-law Salah Ali Sayed, 40; Mostafa Bakr, 60; and Farouk. Egypt’s interior ministry said the men died in a shootout with police, even though the pictures showed no guns inside or around the minibus and witnesses described the men as trying to flee when the police opened fire. The bullets so disfigured Farouk’s face that his fiancee initially said he was unidentifiable.



Soon after that, the ministry said that Regeni’s belongings – including his passport and a wallet – had been found in the home of one of the accused, who in death was unable to defend himself.



In Egypt, officials may have had reason to hope that the identification of Regeni’s alleged killers would put the case to rest. Experts and Italian officials had suspected from the outset that elements of the Egyptian state had carried out the murder, despite the government’s staunch denials. The murder led to a major diplomatic incident between the two countries.

In Rome the story that the men in the minibus had killed Regeni immediately smacked of a cover-up, according to a senior Italian official, and was quickly disregarded. Now, following months of acrimony between Egyptian and Italian officials over the still unsolved murder, the shooting has become a mere footnote in the tragedy.

Egyptian officials have admitted that the group were unlikely to have had any involvement in Regeni’s killing. Egypt’s public prosecutor, Nabil Sadek, said earlier this month that while the case was still under investigation, the link between the five men and Regeni’s death was weak.



After initially recalling its ambassador to Egypt at the height of diplomatic tensions, Italy has since announced a replacement, though in a sign of the still-frosty relationship he has not yet been sent to Cairo.

Giulio Regeni was a PhD student at Cambridge. Photograph: Twitter

Raffaele Marchetti, a professor of international relations at Luiss University in Rome who has followed the case, said Italy had witnessed a slight improvement in Egyptian officials’ cooperation in the ongoing investigation into Regeni’s murder, and that there was an expectation that Egypt could still arrest an official, possibly a low level officer, which would acknowledge some state culpability.

“This has not been formalised, of course, but if you add all the pieces that have been coming up in recent weeks, they point to the idea that, yes, there is the beginning of a recognition of an institutional responsibility,” Marchetti said.

Meanwhile, the families of the five men are united by a sad fact. They do not have the money or the connections to seek justice in Egypt. Four relatives of the victims have also been detained without any assurances that they will be released.

It is a bitter new reality for the family, compared with the their last gathering, on 2 March, when they met to celebrate the birthday of Tarek’s wife, Mabrouka. Video footage of the party shows the family singing and clapping. Salah pulls faces when the camera is pointed at him, the candles on the birthday cake illuminating their smiles. His young brother-in-law Sameh, the person who would later identify Salah’s body, stands in a corner sulkily. Less than two weeks later, three of them would be lying in Cairo’s Zeinhom morgue. Two others would end up behind bars.

Salah and Tarek had become close friends, working together for more than 15 years painting houses or renting and selling cars. Salahwould later marry Tarek’s daughter Rasha when she was 14.



“My brother and my husband were very close, they were always together,” said Rasha, who is often reduced to tears when talking about her family. She said that the accusation that the group was a criminal gang hailed back to an incident in 2001, when Salah and Tarek were stopped at a police checkpoint after finding a wallet belonging to someone from the interior ministry, and subsequently imprisoned for two and three years respectively.

“Even Regeni’s mother says the five who were killed were not the ones who committed this crime,” said Um Yasser, the former wife of Mostafa Bakr, another victim. “So why did the police officers not even leave one of them alive to ask him this question?”

Bakr was a car salesman and friend of the Abdel-Fattah family who was fond of pottering around outside his apartment tending to two neat rows of trees in a dusty lot outside. His dingy green-walled apartment is now almost stripped bare following a police raid, with the only signs of its former warmth the photos of his sons and daughter left on one wall.



Bakr was introduced to Tarek by a friend some years earlier, and had become a friend of the family. Like Saad and Salah, he had had his brushes with the law. He spent 12 years of his marriage in prison on a drug conviction.

It was his son, who declined to give his name for fear of his safety, who would later identify Bakr’s body, before taking a silver and turquoise ring from his father’s dead hand in the morgue. He recalled with his eyes closed and a shudder how his father’s right arm was broken from a bullet above the right elbow. Two more bullets shattered the front of his skull close to the hairline..



His family say his wrists were red as though he had been handcuffed. Sameh, who also viewed the bodies, said that Salah had been shot multiple times across the body and in the right ankle and that Saad’s face showed signs of grazing and scars, as though he had been dragged along the floor.

The police arrived at Bakr’s family home by 10am on the day of the shooting.

Paola Regeni, mother of Giulio, during a press conference. Photograph: Remo Casilli/Reuters

The house of Tarek’s wife Mabrouka was also raided the same day, leading Egyptian police to declare that they had found Regeni’s possessions and documents inside before arresting Mabrouka along with Tarek’s sister, who is also called Rasha. The pair have been held since March, accused of handling stolen goods.

The family said that many of the belongings reported to be Regeni’s in photos taken by police following the raid were actually theirs. A wallet emblazoned with the word “love” belongs to Mabrouka, the watch belongs to Sameh, one wallet was Salah’s and the telephone, headphones and brown aviator sunglasses were all Saad’s, they said.

It is not clear – especially since Egyptian officials now say the five were likely unconnected to Regeni’s death – how the Italian researcher’s passport, bank card and ID documents arrived at Tarek’s sisters’ apartment. There were no withdrawals from Regeni’s bank account and Italian officials said his mobile phone has never been found. “I don’t know why they dragged us into this situation,” said Sameh.

Saeed Youssef, a defence lawyer who represents Mabrouka, Tarek’s sister and two other family members still held in pre-trial detention, described the latest statement by Egypt’s public prosecutor as an insult.

Farouk, the minibus driver, had been with his fiancee, Aya Khalid, for eight years and was engaged for almost two. After his kiosk burned down last year, Khalid’s father had given him the microbus to allow him to make a living driving people around. Khalid insists Farouk and the other four men knew each other from the neighbourhood, but that was the extent of their relationship. His bride-to-be had not picked out a wedding dress when he was killed, She had wanted to save the detail for last so that Farouk could choose it with her.

Farouk’s family describe his body as missing the left side of his face, and say that his legs showed signs of bruising and a severe beating. “He never hid anything from me,” said his fiancee. “I know for sure he never worked with these people, whether they are convicted or not. That was the first time.”

She said she hoped to bring charges against the police officer in charge of the case, but to do so would be to stand against a mass of state machinery. The officer in question is known locally by a nickname that translates as “the one who cracks the whip”.