Footage which showed Guilio Regeni - a Cambridge PhD student who was recently found dead in Egypt - being “led away by two men believed to be Egyptian security agents” existed prior to his disappearance, The New York Times has reported.

The newspaper also claimed “three security officials said Mr. Regeni had indeed been taken into custody, bolstering Italian suspicions of an official hand in his death.”

The footage, which has not been requested by the Egyptian police, has apparently been lost when it was automatically wiped at the end of the month. Human rights advocates say that the police failing to gather the footage “is typical of police investigations” in Egypt and could imply a “possible cover-up”.

Mohamed Zarea, a leading figure of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights studies, told The New York Times that the case “bore the ‘fingerprints of the Egyptian security apparatus’”.

“As we are speaking, there is someone being tortured or facing inhuman treatment in a police station,” Mr. Zarea added.

Varsity had previously reported on the death of Regini, who had been studying at Cambridge’s Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS).

Regeni disappeared in Cairo on the 25th January, before he was found dead nine days later near a highway on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital.

His body was found with “unmistakable signs of torture”, with local media reporting that Regeni had been found naked from the waist down and that there were indications that it had been dragged across the ground.

Regeni had in the past contributed to a communist Italian newspaper called Il Manifesto, insisting on appearing under a pseudonym most likely because he “feared for his safety”.

The doctoral student had been in Egypt to conduct fieldwork into the formation of independent trade unions in post-Mubarak Egypt, which has become a sensitive topic in recent years.