Investigators on Tuesday said they had arrested Mered Medhanie, a 35-year-old Eritrean man thought to be at the heart of the Africa-to-Europe migrant smuggling pipeline.
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Britain’s National Crime Agency, which was also involved in the investigation, said it was aware of a report that the wrong man was arrested but that it was too soon to speculate.
Another Eritrean man told the BBC’s Will Ross he recently shared a house in Sudan with the man who was arrested.
An NCA spokesman said: “We have noted the Guardian’s report”.
Amanuel Zaid, a former Eritrean television employee who lives in the US state of Virginia, tells VOA that he spent four days calling around Sudan trying to learn the whereabouts of his friend and former neighbor from Asmara.
Journalist Meron Estefanos was the first to raise the alarm.
The British National Crime Agency (NCA), thanks to its wide network of worldwide relationships, managed to develop strategic and operative relations with Sudanese authorities in relation to the investigation.
He is accused of being responsible for the deaths of 359 people who drowned when their boat sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2013.
However, a police source claimed that they are certain that they have the right man, and that it was the initial picture of Mered that showed the wrong man.
Italian police released a video of the man they said was Mered arriving at an airport in Rome, but two Eritreans who live in Sudan told Reuters on Thursday it was a case of mistaken identity.
He has been accused of being the mastermind behind the whole trafficking operation, which saw thousands of migrants smuggled across sea to Europe.
Mered’s wife Lidya Tesfu fled to Sweden as a refugee with the couple’s young son.
It is the first time a suspected kingpin has been tracked down in Africa, where numerous smuggling networks are based, and brought to face justice in Italy since Europe’s immigration crisis started nearly three years ago. In a phone interview, Calantropo said he had been contacted by Kidane’s sisters, who he said were working to come up with documentation proving that their brother wasn’t Mered.
Agents from the NCA’s Project Invigor taskforce against people-smuggling located Medhane at an address in the El Diem neighborhood in Khartoum, where he was arrested by Sudanese authorities.
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Other charges include the smuggling of migrants relating to numerous arrivals of boats in Sicily, with aggravating circumstances of the number of smuggled people, inhuman treatment and risk to the life of migrants. More than 2,800 lives have been lost, most on the route to Italy, with the vast majority disappearing at sea, according to the International Organization for Migration.
