CAIRO, Apr 5 (Aswat Masriya) – An official Egyptian delegation will head for Rome on Wednesday to meet with Italian officials to discuss the torture and death of Italian student Giulio Regeni, the Egyptian prosecution announced Tuesday in a statement.

Egypt’s Assistant Prosecutor General Mostafa Sulaiman, along with a number of police officers, will be part of the delegation.

A source from the Italian embassy in Cairo had told Aswat Masriya on Monday that the much anticipated visit was postponed indefinitely. 

Giulio Regeni was a 28-year-old Italian Ph.D. student who went missing in Cairo on Jan. 25, 2016, which marked the fifth anniversary of the popular uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak. Around ten days later, Regeni's body was found, bearing signs of torture, in a roadside ditch on the outskirts of Cairo.

A number of media reports accused Egyptian security forces of torturing the Italian student to death, which the Egyptian interior ministry has denied.  

Egypt's interior ministry said late March they killed four gang members "specialised in impersonating police officers and kidnapping foreigners.” It also said that the police found Regeni's personal belongings in a gang member’s apartment.

However, Italian investigators said that there were “inconsistencies” in the Egyptian police’s narrative. Regeni’s family ruled out criminal gain as a motive for the Italian student’s murder.

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi told Italy's La Repubblica newspaper in March that Regeni's case was “an individual act that no other Italian has ever faced” in Egypt. 

Egyptian and international human rights defenders say Regeni’s case bears similarity to scores of enforced disappearance and torture cases that Egyptians have been purportedly subjected to over the years.