People-smuggling 'kingpin' Mered Medhanie extradited to Italy

[Eugene]

30. Smuggler's victims say police have arrested innocent refugee

Source: The Guardian

Smuggler's victims say police have arrested innocent refugee

Italian and British authorities under increasing pressure over claims
they have caught notorious Eritrean people smuggler

Lorenzo Tondo in Palermo and Patrick Kingsley
Thursday 9 June 2016 19.27 BST

Italian and British police face mounting accusations that they confused a notorious people smuggler with an innocent refugee, after some of the smuggler’s former victims said they did not recognise the suspect extradited to Rome and paraded before the media.

The accusations followed claims from the family, housemates and neighbours of Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe that the 29-year-old had been mistaken for Medhanie Yehdego Mered, a 35-year-old smuggling kingpin supposedly deported from Sudan on Wednesday. Berhe, they say, was in fact a jobless refugee with no involvement in the smuggling business.

The accusations create huge potential embarrassment for both the Italian authorities, who previously claimed to have seized “the boss of one of the most important criminal groups operating in central Africa and Libya”, and Britain’s National Crime Agency, which was involved in the Mered investigationand hailed the capture of “one of the world’s most wanted people smugglers”.

Mered is a a well-known Eritrean people smuggler, based in Sudan and Libya, who has boasted of sending at least 13,000 people from Khartoum to Europe, via Libya and the Mediterranean Sea. Italy said he had been seized in Khartoum in late May and subsequently deported to Rome.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/09/smugglers-victims-say-police-have-arrested-innocent-refugee