Did Italy Just Catch The Wrong Man?
The arrest of an alleged people smuggler has caused a bizarre controversy.
Medhanie Yehdego Mered—aka The General—is a smuggling kingpin. According to Italian police, this 35-year-old Eritrean is responsible for sending more than 10,000 people across the Mediterranean Sea from Libya to Italy, while reaping a vast profit and laughing at the fate of those who perish on his dangerously overcrowded boats.
In the highest profile case of its kind, he was extradited from Sudan to Italy to stand trial for his crimes.
Medhanie’s arrest in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, followed a year-long wiretapping investigation by Italian prosecutors and Britain’s National Crime Agency, the NCA. It was celebrated as the capture of one of the highest ranking people smugglers in central Africa and Libya and as a serious blow to the ability of people smuggling networks to operate with impunity.
But then things got strange.
Just hours after the news broke of his extradition, reports began to emerge that — maybe — Italian and British police had gotten the wrong man.
Our partner in the Ghost Boat investigation, Swedish Eritrean journalist and activist Meron Estefanos, was at the center of the unfolding controversy. She spoke with more than 20 people, including the sister of the man who was extradited, and they all said it was a case of mistaken identity.
The shackled man with a mop of curly hair seen emerging from an airplane in the picture circulated by the Italian police was not ‘The General,” according to Meron’s sources. Instead, it was a 27-year-old Eritrean refugee named Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe, also known as Kidane.
“When the Italian media released the video clip of the man they arrested, my phone started ringing like crazy from people from all over the world,” she told me. “Everyone started telling me that the Italians have a wrong guy, I then started contacting refugees who were smuggled by the real Medhanie and they confirmed to me that it was not the smuggler who smuggled them.”
How exactly the mixup could have happened is a mystery at the moment. The NCA told reporters that “this is a complex multi-partner operation and it is too soon to speculate about these claims” and that it is “confident in its intelligence gathering process” — but Italian and British police are apparently investigating whether they did, in fact, arrest the wrong person.
The General is not the smuggler responsible for the Ghost Boat. In fact, he is a rival of Ibrahim and Jamal, the men who are responsible for it. But the confusion surrounding the case underscores just how hard it is to track down and verify information in the clandestine, chaotic and dangerous world of people smuggling.
This is something that we have become all too familiar with over nine months of trying to find the Ghost Boat. Whether it’s been trying to follow up on reports from the Libyan Red Crescent and International Organization for Migration, looking into leads from the transcripts of wiretapped phone calls or chasing information on the ground in Libya, our investigation has constantly trudged through murky waters full of conflicting information and non-functioning bureaucracies.
The unfolding Medhanie extradition saga is a reminder of just how difficult it is to navigate the world of people smugglers. And perhaps it sheds some light on why, nearly two years after the disappearance, we still have so little concrete information about the fate of the Ghost Boat and it’s passengers.
Onward.
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