Patrick George Zaki, 27, was detained at Cairo’s international airport after returning from Italy on Friday to visit his family.
A graduate student at the University of Bologna, Zaki is a researcher on gender and human rights at the Cairo-based Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), which said he was covertly taken from the airport and interrogated at facilities belonging to Egypt’s national security agency in Cairo and his hometown of Mansoura.
“He was beaten, subjected to electric shocks, threatened and questioned about various issues related to his work and activism,” the EIPR said.
The claims concerning his treatment could not be immediately verified.
Zaki’s arrest has alarmed Italian authorities, causing fear it may lead to a similar outcome of that of Giulio Regeni, an Italian doctoral student who was tortured and murdered in Egypt in 2016.
Despite ongoing cooperation over issues such as the civil war in Libya, Regeni’s case remains an obstacle in Italian-Egyptian relations, and this potentially will be worsened by Zaki’s detention.
The Italian government recalled its ambassador to Cairo from April 2016 until September the following year.
Italy’s parliament suspended relations with Egypt in November 2018, and an ongoing Italian parliamentary inquiry into Regeni’s case continues to accuse Egyptian authorities and citizens of complicity in his disappearance and murder.
Zaki spoke out about the reprisals against Egyptian activists and civil society in 2018, telling Italian news agency Dire: “We fight for our activists, but also for Giulio Regeni … institutions try to prevent people from talking about it. Protests are not allowed. We NGOs face threats.’’
Alessandra Ballerini, the Regeni family’s Italian lawyer, issued a joint statement with the Association of Phd Students and Researchers in Italy, students from the University of Bologna and the student association Link.
“We join our voice with that of the Regeni family in asking the government to include Egypt in the list of unsafe countries and to summon Egypt’s Italian ambassador back to Italy for consultations,” they said.
“With this case, Egypt once again shows the ruthlessness of its dictatorship.”
Zaki’s arrest was the latest in an unprecedented crackdown on dissent waged by El-Sissi in recent years.
Thousands have been arrested – both secular-leaning activists and Islamist opponents – while rolling back freedoms won after the so-called Arab Spring uprising in 2011.
Italy’s foreign ministry told Italian news agency ANSA that the foreign minister, Luigi di Maio, was “following the case closely and has already made contact with the Italian embassy in Cairo in order to obtain information on the arrest of the student”.
