Adel Moawwad, an Egyptian man who went missing in Italy last year, is just one of thousands of missing persons in Italy, many of them murdered, according to Mohamed Hanout, a member of Italy's Egyptian community.
In an interview with TeN TV on Saturday, Hanout said that 30,000 people, both Italians and foreigners, have disappeared in Italy over the decades, their whereabouts unknown.
"The disappearance of foreigners in Italy has been going on since 1974," he said. "The Italian interior minister blames it on people emigrating without informing their families, or else being murdered, with the location of their bodies as yet unknown.”
Hanout said that Italian authorities have not reached any conclusions about the fate of Egyptian Adel Moawwad who went missing in Italy in October, and whose family have been demanding more progress from Italian investigators.
Hanout said that Moawwad's case, and those of other missing persons in Rome, had been given more attention by Italian police since the death of Italian student Giulio Regeni in Egypt. However, so far, there has been no breakthrough in the case.
“A large number of Egyptians are hidden in Milan," said Hanout. "Many Egyptians call me to report on relatives who have gone missing for periods of seven or eight years."
Hanout called on Egypt to find those who killed Regeni and handle the case diplomatically.
Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian PhD student at Cambridge University, disappeared on January 25, on the fifth anniversary of the 2011 uprising that toppled former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Regeni was a visiting scholar at the American University in Cairo and conducted research on independent trade unions.
Ten days later, Regeni’s body was found by the Cairo-Alexandria desert road, his body showing signs of torture.
Critics of the Egyptian goverment were quick to accuse Egyptian security forces for torturing and killing Regeni. However, the government insists that security forces were not responsible, and is continuing its search for the true perpetrators.
The death of Regeni has soured relations between Egypt and Italy, with Italian officials demanding that Egypt share more information, including extensive phone records, in order to establish the truth of the case.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
