'We got him, we got him!' roared the British media yesterday, June 8th, 2016...
Investigators in both countries announced with great fanfare on Wednesday morning that they had seized Medhanie Yehdego Mered, a 35-year-old Eritrean whom an Italian prosecutor called "the boss of one of the most important criminal groups operating in central Africa and Libya".
Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA), which was involved in the investigation, hailed the capture of "one of the world's most-wanted people smugglers", following his extradition on Wednesday to Italy from Sudan, where he had been arrested.
But just hours later both Italy and Britain were looking into whether the Sudanese had sent them the wrong man, after three close friends of the detainee alleged to the Guardian that he was the victim of mistaken identity.
They said the man sent to Italy was in fact Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe, known to some friends by his ancestral name of Kidane, a 27-year-old refugee arrested in a street in Khartoum late last month.
He shared a first name with the wanted man, but he had never been to Libya, where Mered was supposed to have centred his operations, and had nothing to do with people-smuggling, the three men claimed.
Photographs of Berhe, they pointed out, did not resemble those of Mered.
Fshaye Tasfai, a 42-year-old Eritrean exile now living in Sicily, and Berhe's cousin, said he had grown up with Kidane in Asmara, the Eritrean capital. "It's the wrong guy," said Tasfai. "It's incredible - he's not a human trafficker. He's from my family. He lived in my father's house. He left Eritrea in 2014, and then went to Khartoum about a year ago. He lived with my brothers and sisters in Khartoum. He didn't have a job so we used to send him money."
Tasfai's account was corroborated to the Guardian by one of Berhe's flatmates in Khartoum. "He's my best friend," one said. "He's innocent."
His flatmate said Berhe was arrested in the street in late May before being taken home for his room to be searched. Then he disappeared for several days before re-appearing - inexplicably - in Rome on Wednesday.
"They've definitely got the wrong guy," said a third friend, who lived in the same area. "He's not a human trafficker, he's just a simple refugee. We used to drink tea together."
Meron Estefanos, a Sweden-based Eritrean broadcaster well known in the Eritrean diaspora, was the first to raise the alarm. "I have almost 400 people writing to me saying: I know this guy, he grew up with me," she said. "This is the wrong person."
The Italian and British authorities said they were looking into the claims on Wednesday night, though neither would publicly admit to any mistakes.
An NCA spokesperson said: "We have noted your report. This is a complex multi-partner operation and it is too soon to speculate about these claims. The NCA is confident in its intelligence-gathering process."
If it is the wrong man, the news will come as blow to European investigators, who hoped they had finally snared one of their most-wanted suspects. More than 320,000 people reached Italy from Libya in 2014 and 2015, including over 70,000 Eritreans. By his account, Mered - the smuggler who allegedly still remains at large - had a hand in roughly 4% of this market.
Read the rest here
Comment: Talk about getting egg on your face!
Western intel types - British GCHQ in particular (the source of the Italians' 'intelligence' that Berhe/Mered was a so-called people-smuggler) are so pathetic, they can't even frame someone properly!
Barely a day after headlines blasted out across the entire interlink about how Our Great Western Leaders had caught THE top 'people-smuggler', it turns out the man they picked out as a scapegoat is himself a refugee.
It's all distraction of course, because the real people-smugglers are those same shady intel types enticing people into their dirty wars in Syria and elsewhere. And once civilians begin fleeing the ensuing chaos, state agencies again play the dominant role in deciding who moves where.