A judge in Sicily has acquitted five Eritrean men of participating in a human-trafficking ring, marking another failed attempt by Italian investigators to tackle people-smuggling at source.

Despite anti-mafia expertise and international police cooperation, Italy seems to be losing its war against smuggling networks. Countless innocent people continue to end up in prison, while the smugglers’ businesses remain largely intact.

Led by prosecutors in the Sicilian capital, Palermo, Italy’s attempts to bring smugglers to justice began after a shipwreck in October 2013 off the island of Lampedusa that killed 368 people.

The next day European authorities declared war on the people they considered responsible for tragedies at sea. The goal was to capture the smugglers who organised the crossings and dismantle their criminal organisation.

Italy convinced its EU partners to join the crusade on an alluring premise: that the same tactics used to combat the mafia could ensnare the people-smugglers. Amid growing public disquiet about the arrival by boat of thousands of people on European shores, the idea gained immediate support. But lawyers and aid groups say prosecutors repeatedly brought charges against smuggled people rather than the smugglers themselves, with catastrophic results.

Countless asylum seekers have ended up in prison on the basis of uncertain evidence as the smugglers live undisturbed in Africa. According to a UK inquiry, most of the 143 suspects apprehended in European investigations were from the lower rungs of criminal groups. The only supposed kingpin arrested with the help of the British authorities turned out to be a victim of mistaken identity: the Eritrean farmer Medhanie Berhe spent more than three years in an Italian prison before a court ruled in July he was not the notorious trafficker Medhanie Yehdego Mered and freed him immediately.

On Wednesday, the judge in Palermo acquitted the five Eritrean men of the charge of being part of a criminal network smuggling people across the Mediterranean. According to prosecutors, the gang had also allegedly made profits by producing fake family reunification documents, charging migrants $10,000-15,000 (£7,000-10,000) for the paperwork that would help their relatives reach Europe. At the end of their closing remarks, Sicilian prosecutors demanded sentences of up to 25 years in prison. But the judge, Sergio Gulotta, rejected prosecutors’ claims and ordered the immediate release of the five men, who had been held in prison for years.

Many of those jailed for their roles in people-smuggling have been boat drivers. In six years, Italy has imprisoned more than 1,400 migrants for piloting smuggling boats. The majority of them have been released from jail, such as Issa Okrema Ahmad, a 25-year-old Syrian nurse who was acquitted in February last year along with seven other men after two years in prison. Prosecutors in Palermo had asked that they receive life sentences.

“The first move by authorities in the fight against traffickers is to arrest boat drivers, the men at the helm of the vessels carrying migrants,” said Cinzia Pecoraro, an immigration lawyer. “They can get sentences of up to 15 years in prison. But if a migrant drowns during the crossing, then the boat drivers are held responsible for that death. The fact is that boat drivers have nothing to do with migrant smuggling.”

Gigi Omar Modica, a judge at the court of Palermo who in September 2016 took the decision to drop smuggling charges against two boat drivers, said people charged with smuggling were often migrants themselves who had been coerced into the role. “Smugglers almost always force boat drivers to sail, sometimes threatening them with a gun,” said Modica.

Investigations against boat drivers are based on the testimony of other passengers, who, as stated in recent verdicts from court cases, were persuaded to testify against the men at the helm of the vessels in exchange for permits to stay in Italy.

The failure of the Italian government to manage the human-trafficking phenomenon was also pointed out last June by the US government. The Department of State’s 2019 Trafficking in Persons report downgraded Italy to tier 2, citing the fact that the country “does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking”.

In the absence of reliable data and mug shots of suspected traffickers, the authorities have come to rely on social media to identify smugglers. Countless migrants ended up under investigation for having friended a suspected smuggler on Facebook or were arrested upon their landing because of incriminating photos received on WhatsApp.

“We are doing everything wrong,” said Simona Fernandez, president of Associazione Salam, a non-profit organisation carrying out migrant reception projects. “And countless innocent refugees are paying the highest price of our stubbornness. They came to Europe to seek asylum. They have found instead jail.”