Tourism Minister Hisham Zaazou was among dozens attending a memorial ceremony for the murdered Italian student Guilio Regeni on Saturday, held at the Church of St. Joseph in downtown Cairo.
The special mass was led by Father Kamal Labib, head of the Franciscan community in Egypt.
While Zaazou participated in the event, the Italian ambassador and embassy representatives were absent.
"We are exerting the maximum effort to discover the truth… and relations with Italy will not be affected," said Zaazou, adding that he has no information about the killers yet.
Regeni went missing in Cairo on January 25, the fifth anniversary of the 2011 uprising, and his body was discovered 10 days later by the Cairo-Alexandria Road.
He was a PhD candidate at Cambridge University, and was visiting Cairo to conduct research on the labor movement in Egypt. He was also a writer on political topics and had worked for the British-American political analysis firm Oxford Analytica.
There has been much media speculation about who was responsible for Regeni's death, particularly since his body showed signs of torture, which many have interpreted as evidence that he was abducted by Egyptian security forces.
However, the Egyptian government denies such claims, saying that it is committed to finding the student's real killers.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
