Facebook photo of Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe (right), who friends and family believe has been arrested and extradited to Italy after being mistakenly identified as human trafficking kingpin Medhanie Yehdego Mered (left).
Eritreans who say they are the friends and siblings of the man identified by Italian and British criminal investigators as one of the top bosses of the North African human trafficking and smuggling network insist the authorities arrested the wrong man.
In high-profile press conferences on Wednesday in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, and London, the Italian and British authorities identified the man who was arrested on May 24 in Sudan and extradited this week to Rome as Medhanie Yehdego Mered – nicknamed "The General."
The same night, however, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported that the arrested man may not have been Mr. Mered. Since then, several media outlets have carried similar accounts.
In a phone interview with The Globe and Mail on Thursday, a woman named Hiwet Tesfamariam said she is the sister of the man arrested and that he is not Mr. Mered. "He's my brother," said Ms. Tesfamariam, 34, a mother of two who has lived in Oslo, Norway, for five years and was born in Ethiopia. "He's not a smuggler."
She said her brother is named Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe. He is also known to some friends by his ancestral name of Kidane. In a separate interview, her neighbour and friend, Melake Yowhans, an Eritrean who has lived in Norway for 15 years and said he knows the Tesfamariam family well, vouched for her story.
"We were really shocked when we saw him in the media," he said. "The two men don't even look like each other and they have different names. Hewit's brother is a lot younger than Mered and he doesn't even speak Arabic."
Mr. Mered is 35. Mr. Berhe is 27, Mr. Yowhans said, though his age has also been reported as 29. A widely published photo of Mr. Mered does not closely resemble photos published of the arrested man.
Italian prosecutors and Britain's National Crime Agency, which, according to the Italians, played an instrumental role in tracking down Mr. Mered in Sudan, were neither confirming nor denying on Thursday that they had snatched the wrong man.
The Italian and British investigators and prosecutors will suffer a severe blow to their reputation if the alleged Mr. Mered is proven to be someone else. The Italian prosecutors have been tracking Mr. Mered since late 2013, when he was suspected of having arranged the voyage of a boat that sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2013, killing 359 migrants, most of them from Somalia and Eritrea.
On Thursday night, Francesco Lo Voi, the chief state prosecutor in Palermo, said: "We are leading appropriate investigations about this unusual situation. At the moment, all we can say is that the report of the extradited person, his arrest, his delivery and extradition to Italy have been disclosed in an official document from the National Crime Agency, by Interpol and the Sudanese authorities. We'll have details tomorrow."
The man identified as Mr. Mered is to be interrogated by Italian prosecutors on Friday in Rome, where he is in custody in the high-security Rebibbia prison. The videotape of him emerging from an Italian government plane in handcuffs at Rome's Ciampino airport in the early hours on Wednesday was carried by dozens of media outlets around the world.
On Thursday, a Sicilian attorney was appointed to represent the man who may or may not be Mr. Mered or Mr. Berhe. The attorney, Michele Calantropo, will be in Rome on Friday to attend the accused's opening interrogations. Mr. Calantropo told the media that a search is under way to find documents that prove the arrested man is Mr. Berhe, not Mr. Mered.
Mr. Yowhans said that Mr. Berhe had no job in Sudan and was being supported by family members, including his sister in Oslo, another sister in Khartoum and a sister and brother in San Francisco. He said that some family members of Mr. Berhe had last talked to Mr. Berhe about three weeks ago.
Since early 2014, about 8,000 migrants have died crossing the Mediterranean and smugglers such as Mr. Mered are thought to have made vast fortunes from sending rickety boats full of migrants to sea.
The arrest of the man identified by investigators as Mr. Mered was the highest-profile arrest that has come out of the Glauco 1 and Glauco 2 investigations that were launched by Sicilian prosecutors after the 2013 Lampedusa tragedy. Since then, dozens of arrests and convictions have been made. A new investigation is under way that may shed more light on the international reach of the smuggling networks.
Eric Reguly